THERE is a race against time to try to prevent the Friends of Ludlow Museum Resource Centre having to return part of a massive £250,000 grant.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne agreed in his July 2015 Budget to award the Friends £250,000 to facilitate publication online of the unique and historically important geological collections held in Ludlow.

It is money from the fines levied on banks for rigging inter- bank lending rates (LIBOR).

But what happens if the work on the collection that attracts experts and academics from all over the world is not known.

The Friends of the Museum has just started the project to photograph and digitalise a collection of more than 40,000 fossils that are of national and international importance.

But the problem is that the Ludlow Museum Resource Centre is set to close next April as a result of cuts being imposed by Shropshire Council.

If the work is not completed then it is feared that the work will have to stop and the money that has not been spent will have to be returned.

The Friends of Ludlow Museum Resource Centre has engaged consultants that were released by Shropshire Council to save money.

John Cherry is leading the project with Kate Andrew, an ex-curator of Natural History Shropshire). The team also includes Daniel Lockett and Jackie Tweddle.

The race against time to get the job done in less than a year has now started.

It is known as the FISH project, (Fossils in Shropshire) and involves the digitising the geology collections of Shropshire Museum Service.

A small team, contracted by The Friends of Ludlow Museum, have now started work on the 41,000 strong collections of fossils, rocks and minerals.

The collections contain many fossil fish, but also many other types of fossils as well as rocks and minerals. The project will digitise these and the associated paper archives and published references to really enhance access to the varied and important geology of Shropshire.

Volunteers are also joining the project team.

The team have started with a specimen by specimen check of the collection. They are also testing out photographic techniques and rapid data collection methods. The aim is that information and images will be available on the Discovering Shropshire History web-site.

Digital mentor, John Sear, has helped the team to try out a range of scanning, photography software equipment and techniques.

This has included a sensor usually used in Xbox video games and a cutting edge laser scanner used by researchers at Birmingham University.

Software manipulation will allow many images to be created in 3D and really bring the fossils, some as much as 540 million years old to life.

The national significance of the collection was key to securing Libor funding for this project, digital mentoring support has come through the West Midlands Museums Development Scheme.

More information about the project, blogs and images will be posted on the project website which can be found at http://fishproject2020.wix.com/news and via our Twitter feed @FISHdigitise