Despite a global need for geoscience to underpin the exploration and stewardship of minerals, energy and natural resources, and the manufacture of current and future materials, university teaching programs are declining in many countries. In addition to expertise and teaching skill, there is also an irreversible loss of invaluable geological collections. Geological teaching collections vary by subdiscipline and range from core, hand samples, polished and thin sections, and extracted concentrates of rocks, minerals and fossils. This paper presents one strategy for geological knowledge and sample conservation in a digital age. We focused on our own discipline where in recent years, the teaching of coal geology and organic petrology has sharply declined across Australian universities. Organic petrology not only supports a strong metallurgical coal industry, it also records plant evolution and climate signatures through time, informs source and burial history models for hydrocarbons and sedimentary hosted minerals, and underpins development of future carbon materials. The Australian Coal Association Research Program (ACARP) supported a prototype development of a Digital Petrographic Atlas of Australian Coals designed to support self-directed learning and teaching of organic petrography. We used the Hilgers Fossil™ system to collect, compile, view and analyse high-resolution, reflectance-calibrated images of representative coal samples. We utilised the university and government geological survey collections to ensure open file access and focused on key drill core samples from the Early and Late Permian coal measures of the Bowen Basin with selected Mesozoic coal from Queensland. A total of 85 polished coal blocks were retrieved, freshly polished and scanned to capture petrographic variability in composition and rank within and between coals in different geological settings. The scans were used to develop an Illustrated Atlas as well as a Digital Library of Scanned Samples that can be uploaded to a software viewer that emulates the optical microscope for each user to learn and practice petrographic analysis. More broadly, the product serves as a pilot for the digital preservation of teaching collections in both universities and government agencies, that can be utilised for continued teaching and skills development, both within and outside the university environment.