Histology images are an important resource for research, education and medical practice. The availability of image collections with reference purposes is limited to printed formats such as books and specialized journals. When histology image sets are published in digital formats, they are composed of some tens of images that do not represent the wide diversity of biological structures that can be found in fundamental tissues. Making a complete histology image collection available to the general public having a great impact on research and education in different areas such as medicine, biology and natural sciences. This work presents the acquisition process of a histology image collection with 20,000 samples in digital format, from tissue processing to digital image capturing. The main purpose of collecting these images is to make them available as reference material to the academic comunity. In addition, this paper presents the design and architecture of a system to query and explore the image collection, using content-based image retrieval tools and text-based search on the annotations provided by experts. The system also offers novel image visualization methods to allow easy identification of interesting images among hundreds of possible pictures. The system has been developed using a service-oriented architecture and allows web-based access in http://www.informed.unal.edu.co