The “master” copy of the ITSD is now held at the Zoological Society in London with “mirror” copies of this master held within the University of Tasmania in Hobart and the Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra.  The master and mirror copies are kept constantly revised and updated as new information comes to light. 

The Zoological Society was chosen to hold the “master” copy of the ITSD because of the society's historic association with the thylacine.  The bulk of the early scientific papers on the species were published within its “Proceedings” and the society's zoo in Regents Park exhibited more thylacines than any other zoo outside of Australia.
 

Careful study of the data within the ITSD has enabled a number of wild-caught thylacines to be traced from their point of capture in Tasmania through to their exhibition in zoological gardens both within Australia and Internationally, and upon their deaths their remains can be tracked into the zoological collections of the world's great museums and universities. The ITSD has also enabled purchases, exchanges and transfers of thylacine specimens from institution to institution to be identified.  It has also revealed some interesting regional differences with respect to the collecting of specimens.  The museums and universities of Germany for example hold more thylacine taxidermy mounts than any other country. The ITSD is currently assisting researchers looking at the movement of the earliest known thylacine specimens between collections.  It has recently helped to establish that one of the two taxidermy type specimens that Temminck described in the Leiden Museum of Natural History (Naturalis) in 1824 is not in fact the male specimen that Temminck noted but a female specimen which was a later addition to the collection.

. Dr Stephen Sleightholme (ITSD Project Director) working on thylacine specimen material in the South Australian Museum collection.

The ITSD has highlighted the activities of several of the major animal dealers who procured thylacine specimens for the world's museums and zoos.  It has directly assisted in accurately dating specimens where no date had been previously recorded through the known activities of these dealership channels in that their period of operation was generally known. 

The ITSD was first published in April 2005 on three CD-ROMs totaling some 1.2 GB of data.  The May 2006 revision totals some 2.4 GB of data and will be released on a single DVD-ROM.
 

. The International Thylacine Specimen Database CD-ROM set originally published in April 2005.

The data sets include all of the available information on each specimen and are presented in the form of spreadsheets formatted in Microsoft Excel.  The data sets have been subdivided into six geographical locations: Australia and New Zealand, Tasmania, UK & Eire, Europe, North America, and Asia.

Specimen data includes country, city, holding institution, identification number, date of acquisition, sex, specimen type, collector, source, old ID numbers and any additional remarks pertaining to the specimen.