A vast number of Sir Hans Sloane’s Collections, and information about them, have been digitised and made available by the Natural History Museum (NHM), the British Museum (BM) and the British Library (BL). Below we list resources readily available for browsing, searching and learning more about Sloane’s collections.
Reconstructing Sloane
A forerunner of the Sloane Lab, Reconstructing Sloane aims to eventually digitise and catalogue Hans Sloane’s collections across the British Library, British Museum and Natural History Museum and to identify and link Sloane’s networks of contacts, in order to help us understand how knowledge was formed and exchanged through objects in the early modern world and the implications this has for us today.
On this website you will find information, links and a blog about not only these various projects, but also other Sloane-related projects including PhDs, MAs, and ongoing projects such as the Sloane’s Printed Books Catalogue, and The Sloane Letters Project.
Enlightenment Architectures
The Enlightenment Architectures project has produced open access digital scholarly editions of five of Hans Sloane’s manuscript catalogues of his collections. These five catalogues (Miscellanies, Fossils I, Fossils V, MS 3972C Vol.VI and MS 3972B) represent a selection of Sloane’s extant catalogues from across the three national institutions created by Hans Sloane’s will: the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum (London).
Sir Hans Sloane’s Jamaican collections
“Sloane’s Jamaican collections comprise 1,589 dried plant specimens collected by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) during his voyage to Jamaica from 1687 to 1689.”
Sir Hans Sloane’s Jamaican collections Central Hub
Specimens from Sloane’s voyage to Jamaica in NHM’s Data Portal
[ ⏬ Download ] Sloane Herbarium 1,279 records in CSV format
[ 🔎 SEARCH ] Search for a Specimen
British Museum: Explore the collection
Τhe British Museum does not offer a dedicated section for Sloane’s Collections per se however items can be searched through the BM’s Explore the collection search page.
[ 🔎 SEARCH ] How can I search only through Sloane’s Collections?
- Visit Explore the collection and search with your search query;
- On the left hand-side of the search results select the filter
Person/Organisation; - In the pop-up type in “sloane”;
- Select
Sir Hans Sloane.
Browse 13,459 artefacts by Sir Hans Sloane in BM’s digitised collection
Sloane at the British Library
Update (23 Jan 2024): The British Library is experiencing “a major technology outage as a result of a cyber-attack”, so the following links are not working temporarily.
Sloane Printed Books Catalogue: “A catalogue and virtual reconstruction of Sir Hans Sloane’s dispersed library”
[ 🔎 SEARCH ] Sloane Printed Books: Special search engine created by the British Library for the Sloane Printed Books catalogue, featuring a Quick search as well as Advanced Search
