About

MINIM-UK (Musical Instruments Interface for Museums and Collections) is the largest virtual collection of historically significant musical instruments in the UK, led by the Royal College of Music in major partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, the Horniman Museum and University of Edinburgh. The project has been supported thanks to an award from Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE’s) Catalyst Fund.

The resource allows the exploration of c.20,000 individual instruments held in more than 100 venues in the UK.

MINIM-UK also aggregates information to MIMO(Musical Instrument Museums Online), a European Commission-funded project that currently consolidates the collections of two dozen museums (mimo-international.com), and to Europeana (www.europeana.eu), which collects and provides access to millions of digitised items from libraries, archives, audio-visual collections and museums across Europe, meaning the phenomenal public collections of musical instruments in the UK are accessible as never before.

Gabriele Rossi Rognoni, Curator of the Royal College of Music’s Museum, explains:

“The instruments collected by the Royal College of Music, Edinburgh University, Royal Academy of Music and the Horniman Museum over the centuries are an important part of our national heritage. It is tremendously exciting to enable so many people to connect with these beautiful and fascinating objects in a myriad of new ways.”