A £1.8 million funding package is supporting a new project to digitise more than 700,000 biological specimens, including insects and plants. Multiple outlets report that the work will convert physical collections into digital records, helping researchers access information more easily and “unlock” data considered important for understanding biodiversity. The project focuses on documenting specimens held in collection systems, with insects and plant samples named among the items that will be digitised. While the articles differ slightly in wording, they broadly agree on the scale of the digitisation effort and the funding level. The initiative is presented as a step toward improving the availability and usability of specimen data, which can support studies on species identification, distribution, and conservation. Details on timelines, specific institutions involved, and how the digitised materials will be accessed are not included in the provided excerpts. The reports collectively describe the effort as a large-scale digitisation programme aimed at making critical biodiversity information more accessible to the scientific community.