Museum Victoria is a multidisciplinary museum in Melbourne, Australia with three public venues – Melbourne Museum, Scienceworks and the Immigration Museum. The museum’s collection dates back to 1854 and comprises natural sciences (including zoological, palaeontological, and geological specimens) and humanities (including indigenous cultures, history and technology collections). The museum cares for an estimated 17 million items, many of which are grouped together as a single entry in the electronic cataloguing system.
The MV Collections website provides access to over 1.15 million records, representing items in the Humanities collection; specimens in the Sciences collection; articles written about significant people, places and parts of the collection; and species profiles written about animals that can be observed in the wild. A search may deliver results across items, species, specimens or article records. Results can be refined by adding a new search term to the existing query, or by using the supplied filters. The million plus records are illustrated by over 170,000 images, videos and sounds. We wish to encourage reuse and sharing of content. To that end, all the information written by curators, collection managers, and others is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. The elements of each record that are defined as ‘data’ carry a CC0 license. Images carry open licenses wherever possible or are marked as Public Domain as applicable.