Published November 4, 2022 | Version 1.0.0
Dataset Open

The dataset of the Global Collections survey of natural history collections

Creators

  • 1. Natural History Museum, London
  • 2. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Contributors

Contact persons:

Project leaders:

Project manager:

  • 1. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 2. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
  • 3. Natural History Museum, London (as at 2017)
  • 4. Academy of Natural Science, Philadelphia (as at 2017)
  • 5. American Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 6. Australian Museum (as at 2017)
  • 7. Bombay Natural History Society (as at 2017)
  • 8. Burke Museum (as at 2017)
  • 9. California Academy of Sciences (as at 2017)
  • 10. Canadian Museum of Nature (as at 2017)
  • 11. Carnegie Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 12. CeNak (Centrum für Naturkunde)  (as at 2017)
  • 13. CSIRO National Research Collection (as at 2017)
  • 14. Denver Museum of Nature & Science (as at 2017)
  • 15. Ditsong National Museum (Transvaal Museum) (as at 2017)
  • 16. Field Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 17. Florida Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 18. Geneva Conservatory and Botanical Garden (as at 2017)
  • 19. Geneva Natural History Museum (as at 2017)
  • 20. Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (as at 2017)
  • 21. Hebrew University of Jerusalem (as at 2017)
  • 22. Hungarian Natural History Museum (as at 2017)
  • 23. La Plata Museum (as at 2017)
  • 24. LUOMUS Finnish Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 25. Missouri Botanical Garden (as at 2017)
  • 26. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (as at 2017)
  • 27. Museo de Historia Natural, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (as at 2017)
  • 28. Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN) (as at 2017)
  • 29. Museum für Naturkunde (as at 2017)
  • 30. Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (as at 2017)
  • 31. Museums Victoria (as at 2017)
  • 32. Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS (as at 2017)
  • 33. National Botanic Garden of Belgium (Botanic Garden Meise) (as at 2017)
  • 34. National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) (as at 2017)
  • 35. National Museum of Brazil (as at 2017)
  • 36. National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo (as at 2017)
  • 37. National Museums of Kenya (as at 2017)
  • 38. National Science Museum, Daejeon (as at 2017)
  • 39. Natural History Museum Los Angeles County (as at 2017)
  • 40. Natural History Museum, University of Florence (as at 2017)
  • 41. Natural History Museums, UC Berkeley (as at 2017)
  • 42. Naturalis Biodiversity Center (as at 2017)
  • 43. Naturhistorisches Museum Basel (as at 2017)
  • 44. Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (as at 2017)
  • 45. Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (as at 2017)
  • 46. New York Botanical Garden (as at 2017)
  • 47. Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) (as at 2017)
  • 48. Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale (as at 2017)
  • 49. Queensland Museum (as at 2017)
  • 50. Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (as at 2017)
  • 51. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (as at 2017)
  • 52. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (as at 2017)
  • 53. Royal Ontario Museum (as at 2017)
  • 54. San Diego Natural History Museum (as at 2017)
  • 55. Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 56. Senckenberg Society for Natural History Research (as at 2017)
  • 57. South African National Biodiversity Inst (SANBI) (as at 2017)
  • 58. South Australia Museum (as at 2017)
  • 59. State Museum of Natural History, Karlsruhe (as at 2017)
  • 60. Statens Naturhistoriske Museum (as at 2017)
  • 61. Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History (as at 2017)
  • 62. Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand (as at 2017)
  • 63. University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum (as at 2017)
  • 64. University of Michigan Herbarium and Museum of Zoology (as at 2017)
  • 65. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (as at 2017)
  • 66. University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology (as at 2017)
  • 67. University of Nebraska State Museum (as at 2017)
  • 68. V. L. Komarov Botanical Institute (as at 2017)
  • 69. Western Australia Museum (as at 2017)
  • 70. Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (as at 2017)
  • 71. Zoological Museum of Kiel University (as at 2017)
  • 72. Zoological Museum, University of Moscow (as at 2017)
  • 73. Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, Leibniz Institute (as at 2017)

Description

From 2016 to 2018, we surveyed the world’s largest natural history museum collections to begin mapping this globally distributed scientific infrastructure. The resulting dataset includes 73 institutions across the globe. It has:

  • Basic institution data for the 73 contributing institutions, including estimated total collection sizes, geographic locations (to the city) and latitude/longitude, and Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers where available.

  • Resourcing information, covering the numbers of research, collections and volunteer staff in each institution.

  • Indicators of the presence and size of collections within each institution broken down into a grid of 19 collection disciplines and 16 geographic regions.

  • Measures of the depth and breadth of individual researcher experience across the same disciplines and geographic regions.

This dataset contains the data (raw and processed) collected for the survey, and specifications for the schema used to store the data. It includes:

  1. A diagram of the MySQL database schema.
  2. A SQL dump of the MySQL database schema, excluding the data.
  3. A SQL dump of the MySQL database schema with all data. This may be imported into an instance of MySQL Server to create a complete reconstruction of the database.
  4. Raw data from each database table in CSV format.
  5. A set of more human-readable views of the data in CSV format. These correspond to the database tables, but foreign keys are substituted for values from the linked tables to make the data easier to read and analyse.
  6. A text file containing the definitions of the size categories used in the collection_unit table.

The global collections data may also be accessed at https://rebrand.ly/global-collections. This is a preliminary dashboard, constructed and published using Microsoft Power BI, that enables the exploration of the data through a set of visualisations and filters. The dashboard consists of three pages:

Institutional profile: Enables the selection of a specific institution and provides summary information on the institution and its location, staffing, total collection size, collection breakdown and researcher expertise.

Overall heatmap: Supports an interactive exploration of the global picture, including a heatmap of collection distribution across the discipline and geographic categories, and visualisations that demonstrate the relative breadth of collections across institutions and correlations between collection size and breadth. Various filters allow the focus to be refined to specific regions and collection sizes.

Browse: Provides some alternative methods of filtering and visualising the global dataset to look at patterns in the distribution and size of different types of collections across the global view.

Notes

Funding was provided by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum, London, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Files

global_collections_schema_diagram.pdf

Files (1.6 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:c1a741b6ebe19ccd316aabea033398f2
6.5 kB Download
md5:3f4ce3a7e95f215dbf4fcd331bc0c230
53.0 kB Preview Download
md5:81ce235201294bb887b43c0fb97859a1
1.1 MB Download
md5:c62e8005d453d779ce314d881a57a96e
453 Bytes Preview Download
md5:697562629d75ddc0db1f7593cefe2b21
221.6 kB Preview Download
md5:4e83914eab0e52b74cd5198559ceff55
242.4 kB Preview Download