Mrs Helen Hardy

I am the Science Digital Programme Manager at the Natural History Museum, helping to set data free from a collection of some 80 million items. I lead the digitisation team (currently c.15 staff), developing innovative mass digitisation workflows for a wide variety of specimen types, from ancient herbaria to pinned insects and microscope slides, as well as working on the Museum's underlying data infrastructure including our Data Portal (www.data.nhm.ac.uk ), and on the policies, standards and cultural aspects around digitisation, working with national and international partners.

I came to the Museum from HM Revenue & Customs, where I held a variety of fast stream and leadership roles including tax legislation, communications with customers and stakeholders, management of teams of up to 50 staff, and major digital programmes including migrating BusinessLink content for businesses to Gov.uk. While the collections at the museum are unique, the people and data challenges have a lot in common with other organisations!