Kew Herbarium's Digital Collection

The Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew houses approximately 7 million specimens, collected from all around the world. Specimens are either pressed and dried or preserved in spirit. The oldest specimens were collected more than 200 years ago and ninety-eight percent of all flowering plant genera are represented within our collections.

Kew is committed to making this important collection more accessible to botanists and others, wherever they may be, for use in their own projects: particularly in biodiversity, conservation, sustainable development and systematics. To this end we are building an electronic Herbarium Catalogue containing images of the specimens and information taken from their collection labels.

So far only part of the collection is available in digital format. We are actively digitising the collection through routine curatorial activity and through a range of new projects which target priority subsets of the collection. Our digital resources are thus growing at an increasing rate. Please contact us if you have suggestions for new target groups.

Growing Digital Resources

The Herbarium's core digital collection programme was initiated in 2002 and since then our digital resources have grown at an increasing rate. As well as our central Herbarium Catalogue, we have an image server and many project databases with information about specimens that were built before the Catalogue became available. These are being moved into the Catalogue as resources permit.

Herbarium Catalogue

To date we have prioritised the digitisation of Type specimens and the digitisation of material of relevance to key projects.

	Type specimens	All specimens
Dried pressed specimens	150716	528923
Specimens preserved in spirit	1566	73813
Total	152282	602736

Images

	Type specimens	All specimens
Digital Images of specimens	137936	282067

Other resources

Many other projects at Kew have built databases contain records for a further 259,792 specimens. These project databases have been built using standard core fields and terminologies and the records are being moved into the Herbarium Catalogue as resources permit.