Digitising for our lives: Kew's mission to capture 8 million specimens

In 2022 RBG Kew began a four-year project to digitise over eight million plant and fungi specimens with a view to making our collections freely available around the world. As we pass the halfway point, this presentation reflects on the anatomy of the project, from its scope and scale to specific imaging techniques and quality assurance methods. Crucially, we discuss this in the wider context of how large-scale digitisation will help us serve the scientific community to better understand and to protect the natural world.