Herbaria and other scientific collections are - in addition to a large library - essential parts of a research institute specializing in taxonomic botany. The fate of such an institute is, therefore, closely linked with the fate of its collections.
The largest and most important collection of the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem was that of C. S. Kunth, Vice-Director of the Botanical Garden, who died in 1850. Before he took over the position in Berlin, he had lived in Paris from 1815 to 1828 while working on the plants collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland in America. Kunth's herbarium was a collection of ca. 70.000 specimens, comprising about 54,500 species, and contained ca. 3,000 types of taxa described in the "Nova genera et species . . ." as well as many duplicates from the herbarium in Paris, and plants from the botanical gardens in Paris and Berlin and other important collections.

The Virtual Laboratory (VL) is a digitalization project devoted to the history of the experimentalization of life. Its main focus is the interaction between the life sciences, arts and architecture, media and technology. It consists of two related parts, an archive and an essay section.
As an archive, the VL offers numerous scans of texts and images concerning experiments, instruments, buildings, scientists and artists between 1830 and 1930.
The essay section constitutes a platform where historians of science, culture and technology as well as students can present their recent research on the experimentalization of life and explore new modes of writing history.