The Phthiraptera collection comprises the records of all the slide-mounted parasitic lice material at the Natural History Museum, London. It includes the main collection and the four discrete historical collections of Richard Balter, Henry Denny, Edouard Piaget and Seinosuke Uchida.

The Phthiraptera collection was digitised to refine our slide digitisation workflow and to provide images for metadata extraction using machine learning.

Each specimen record has been published with an image capturing both the specimen and its associated labels and creating an inventory record with a unique identifier (barcode) and taxon information. High resolution images were taken of specimens marked as a primary type or a representative specimen if no marked type material was available.

Additional metadata about the individual author contributions is available as a separate metadata file.

This collection was digitised as part of the Museum's Digital Collections Programme and the SYNTHESYS3 Project (EU FP7 programme SYNTHESYS3 [FP7-312253]).