The National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) was founded in 1920 in order to fulfil a recognised need for accumulating and disseminating information on bacterial pathogens. It is the longest-established collection of its kind anywhere in the world and today supplies over 6,000 type and reference strains - many of medical, scientific and veterinary importance - to academic, health, food and veterinary institutions worldwide. Recently, a collaboration between NCTC and the Wellcome Sanger Institute established the NCTC3000 project to long-read sequence and assemble the genomes of up to 3,000 NCTC strains. Here, we illustrate the utility of this new dataset via a case study, where the genomes of 133 Staphylococcus aureus strains accessioned over the last century are analysed for the presence of Staphylococcus enterotoxin genes. We both find new biological information on this key virulence gene family and show how genomic datasets can add value to an historic strain collection.