Welcome to Reconstructing Sloane


In 2010 a core group of senior curators, librarians and scientists from the British Museum, British Library and the Natural History Museum created an informal research consortium to explore ways in which the vast dispersed collections of their common founder Sir Hans Sloane could be understood – by each other, by academic researchers and the general public.

On this website you will find information, links and a blog about not only these various projects, but also other Sloane-related projects including PhDs, MAs, and ongoing projects such as the Sloane’s Printed Books Catalogue, and The Sloane Letters Project. We encourage both scholars working directly on Sloane and those working indirectly through the use of Sloane-owned materials or via work on his contemporaries to be in touch, since the aim is that this site will work as a gathering and information dissemination point for all ‘Sloane studies’.

For more information about the history of the Reconstructing Sloane network, please see the about page.


The reconstructingsloane.org site was built and managed by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird and is now co-edited by Alice Wickenden.

Picture credits, header from left to right: Terracotta portrait bust of Sir Hans Sloane by Michael Rysbrack, The British Museum (author’s photograph); Frontispiece of Hans Sloane, “A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica”, Biodiversitylibrary.org; Portrait of Sir Hans Sloane, Bt by Stephen Slaughter, National Portrait Gallery, London; Sir Hans Sloane’s specimen tray, The Natural History Museum.