Management of natural history collections
Assess, document and benchmark your natural history collection
CollMan — short for Collection Manager — is an online portal that scores museum (especially natural history) collections against 20 transparent criteria and brings everything else around the collection into one place: profile and external links, curatorial activities, loans, publications, permits, anonymous peer benchmarking, and live visibility in GBIF.
Open knowledge base
Explore the public data behind CollMan
Two open-data products are freely browsable — no login required: the Atlas of Invertebrate Distribution in Poland and the registry of Polish forms of nature protection.
Atlas of Invertebrate Distribution
A growing public Atlas of invertebrate species recorded in Polish protected areas. Built from museum collections and peer-reviewed sources, with Darwin Core compatibility for GBIF.
Polish Forms of Nature Protection
Reference of all protected areas registered in Poland: national parks, reserves, landscape parks, Natura 2000 sites, and other forms. Data sourced from CRFOP.
Five valuation tiers
Each collection receives a numeric score and a rank, based on 20 weighted criteria.
Everything around the collection, in one place
Each collection record is split into focused tabs you can fill in over time.
Assessment
20 weighted criteria — taxonomic composition, conservation status, historical significance and more — producing a transparent, reproducible score and rank.
Profile
Type, scope, storage form, status, country list and links to external catalogues. Shared across every assessment version of the collection.
Curatorial activities
Plan, track and complete work — digitisation, conservation, accessioning, research — with an upper-bound forecast of the next score.
Loans
Inbound and outbound specimen loans with expected return dates, status tracking, and overdue flagging.
Publications
Cite-tracking with DOI auto-lookup via CrossRef. The citation index aggregates papers, monographs and theses across the collection.
Permits
Collecting, import, export and Nagoya-ABS permits with PDF document storage and expiry-soon warnings.
Benchmark
Opt in to an anonymous distribution of scores across peer collections of the same type — see where you stand without revealing identity.
External visibility
Buttons to GBIF, BOLD and AMUNATCOLL, plus live GBIF record counts and last-update dates when a dataset is linked.
Use cases for the management of natural history collections
What curators, collection managers and institutions get out of CollMan.
Justify funding for your collection
CollMan generates a documented, reproducible scientific value score based on 20 peer-reviewed criteria. Use the PDF export to support grant applications, institutional reporting and natural history collection funding justification — a transparent number replaces "trust me, it's important".
Benchmark against peer collections
Opt in to anonymous museum collection benchmarking: compare your collection's score against the distribution of similar collections worldwide. Understand where you stand on each criterion and identify the lowest-cost improvements to climb the rank.
Plan curation work systematically
Track collection curation planning as discrete actions — digitisation, conservation, accessioning, identification — each linked to the criteria it would improve. CollMan shows an upper-bound forecast of your next score, so curatorial effort is steered toward impact.
Make your collection visible in GBIF
Connect your collection to its GBIF dataset and CollMan surfaces live GBIF collection metrics — record counts, last update date, direct dataset link — on every show page and PDF. Visibility becomes part of the collection's scored profile.
How it works
Create the profile
Name the collection, set the owner and date, classify the type and scope, and paste links to external catalogues.
Answer 20 evaluation criteria
From taxonomic composition to conservation status — the form guides you through each one. The score and rank are computed server-side.
Track activities and outputs
Record curatorial work, loans, citing publications and permits as they happen — each on its own tab.
Share, benchmark, revise
Download a tailored PDF, send a read-only share link, opt in to the anonymous benchmark, or save a new assessment version when things change.
Who is it for?
Museum curators
Document the relative scientific value of holdings to support funding, conservation, and acquisition decisions.
Field researchers
Catalogue and rank specimens collected during fieldwork, with reproducible criteria.
Natural history collectors
Understand the scholarly significance of private collections beyond market valuation.