‘A practical beginning’: Digitising Florence Nightingale

Abstract

In 2012, the Florence Nightingale Museum began a project to digitise its collection of letters by Florence Nightingale. At that time there were very few Nightingale letters available to the public online. The aims of the project were to develop relationships with stakeholders and potential partners, improve access to the letters for an audience beyond the physical space of the museum, to ensure the sustainability of the online collection and provide impetus for other institutions with collections of Nightingale correspondence to undertake digitisation projects of their own. These digital collections could then be interlinked through a global portal. This paper presents, as a case study, details of the planning and implementation of this project and summarises best practice and lessons learned throughout.