Birmingham museums unlocks 100 years of collections through global crowdsourcing project

Birmingham Museums is celebrating a major milestone in an initiative that is transforming access to more than a century of collection records.

Documentation Detectives, part of the museum’s 10-year Dynamic Collections programme, was launched to enable volunteers to transcribe paper accession registers dating back over 100 years.

These records, which document vital information about the origins, materials and histories of objects, are being digitised and added to Birmingham Museums’ collections database to make them more accessible for research, exhibitions and public use.

Over the past two years, more than 3,400 volunteers from around the world have taken part in the project via the online platform Zooniverse, completing over 85,000 accession records dating from 1912 to 2003.

The records cover objects from a wide range of collections, including archaeology, fashion, fine art, numismatics, social history and natural science.

The final batch of records was uploaded for transcription on 31 December 2025, marking a significant step forward in the long-term ambition to create a comprehensive public collections database.

Research uncovered through the project directly informed The Elephant in the Room: The Roots and Routes of the City’s Collections, an exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery that explores Birmingham’s global connections and the colonial histories behind some museum objects.

Transcribed accession records helped curators identify and contextualise items linked to imperial trade and conflict, ensuring the exhibition was grounded in robust historical evidence.

The next phase of the project will see the transcriptions imported into a dedicated accession registers section of the collections database exactly as entered by volunteers.

This data will then be used to fill gaps in core object records, a crucial step towards making the museum’s collections fully searchable and accessible to the public.

Further documentation projects are planned, with opportunities for both Birmingham-based participants and remote volunteers to get involved.

Alex Pinford, Collections Information assistant and project lead at Birmingham Museums Trust, said: “This landmark step in our Dynamic Collections project has brought us tangibly closer to building the public collections database we have dreamt of for years, opening doors that have been closed for generations.

“We still vividly remember the shock we felt when our initially prepared batch of 28,000 files was completed by our volunteers in less than two weeks.

“The project has surpassed all expectations, and we cannot thank our documentation detectives enough for their contributions.”