Digitizing Biological Collections

Digitizing Biological Collections

Institute for Digital Information & Scientific Communication – Florida State University 1

Five Task Clusters in Specimen Digitization

Gil Nelson and Deb PaulBotany 2012July 12, 2012



28 Collections10 Museums

Spanning biological and paleontological collectionsInsects and other invertebrates, plants, birds, mammals

Wet, dry

Assessing Digitization Practices in Biological and Paleontological Collections

Five task clusters that enable efficient and effective digitization of biological collectionsGil Nelson, Deborah Paul, Gregory Riccardi, Austin R. Mast



American Museum of Natural HistoryBotanical Research Institute of TexasFlorida Museum of Natural History

Florida State UniversityHarvard Herbarium

Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard)New York Botanical Garden

Southeast Regional Network for Expertise and CollectionsSpecify Software Project (University of Kansas)

Symbiota Software Project (Arizona State University)Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy

Tulane University Museum of Natural HistoryUniversity of Kansas Insect Museum

Valdosta State UniversityYale Peabody Museum

Acknowledgments

Pre-digitization Curation

or “Staging”

Image Capture

Data Capture

Image Processing

Image/Data Storage

Geo-referencing



Personnel

Written Protocols

Biodiversity informatics Manager

Task Clusters(modules)



Dominant Digitization Patterns Observed



Iterative modules

A BBarcode Image Data

A B

A B

Personnel specialization & availability | Reduces bottlenecks | Technician preference





















Documents

Digitizing Biological Collections