John Ruskin (1819-1900) assembled his teaching collection as a series of exemplary works to aid his teaching of drawing whilst Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 1870-8 and 1883-5. Eventually incorporating some 1,470 objects, to be used in conjunction with written catalogues which ran to 12 different versions, the collection was a sophisticated teaching and learning machine, ordered, catalogued and annotated by Ruskin. This paper introduces the collection and the ways it was intended to work, before explaining how it is being digitised, and the benefits this will bring to a collection uniquely suited to such treatment.