Darwin Core provides a standard for describing and retrieving electronically the objects contained within natural history specimen collections and species observation databases. The standard was developed by the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center as part of its Species Analyst research project.

As the United States Node to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the National Biological Information Infrastructure uses the Darwin Core standard, in conjunction with the Distributed Generic Infomation Retrieval (DiGR) protocol, to support the harvsting of museum collections databases in the United States; these museum holdings are then made available to the world through the GBIF Web site. Currently, the NBII has provided GBIF with more than 36 million Darwin Core-compliant specimen records.