Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to support museums in recording, cataloguing and preserving collections and community narratives for posterity.

Museums play a vital role in preserving our shared heritage, ensuring that the stories of communities are passed on to future generations. The Government supports this work through a range of measures, and in 2025/26 invested over £500 million into the sector including critical infrastructure projects. Funding for non-national museums includes the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund which has been running for the last 24 years with £4 million funding in 2025-27 for the creation of new display spaces and collections interpretation, ensuring that important local history and stories are preserved and shared with the public.

Digitisation initiatives across the sector have significantly increased the availability of collections data online. This includes the Government-funded Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo UK) programme, which is creating a national digital infrastructure for natural science collections, enabling the mass digitisation of specimens to enhance their research potential, public use, preservation for generations to come.