Accepted Poster Session: No specimen left behind: Industrial scale digitisation of natural history collections

Title: No specimen left behind: Industrial scale digitisation of natural history collections

Authors: Vince Smith* and Vladimir Blagoderov**

Abstract: Digitisation of biodiversity literature and of specimens is crucial to mobilising our accumulated biodiversity knowledge and a cornerstone of Biodiversity Informatics research. Collection digitisation projects usually deal with isolated parts of collections based on taxonomy or geography or other criteria. Specimen digitisation still lags far behind literature digitisation in terms of process rates and workflows. Detailed imaging and capturing of associated metadata of individual specimens is enormously time-consuming. Industrial approach is needed to advance digitisation of three-dimensional natural history collections which includes:

• determining significant parts of a collection with uniformly mounted specimens (e.g. drawers of insects, slides);
• imaging and annotating en masse
• software and hardware automation (conveyors, OCR, automatic ROI recognition); 
• assigning uIDs/DOIs
• web publication of collection images to allow crowdsourcing metadata enhancement. 

* Cybertaxonomist, Natural History Museum
** Manager of the Sackler Biodiversity Imaging Lab, Natural History Museum