Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
We have completed digitising the Museum’s birdwing butterfly collection. Images of more than 8000 specimens have been released onto the Museum’s data portal for anyone in the world to access. This digitisation project has enabled us to gather accurate information about what we have within our collection and this new online resource will support conservation plans to protect endangered species for the future.
Over the past year the digital collections team have worked on incredibly varied projects across multiple collections in the Museum. Continue reading “Digitising the Collection in 2018”
This is the second part of the story behind about the ALICE pilot project. While the first part focused on piloting our ‘Angled Label Image Capture and Extraction’ or ALICE, this part will focus on the collection and collector. Quite unexpectedly, while preparing our chosen collection for imaging I got to know a person through his collection of pinned insects. Continue reading ““Mr. Cooper, meet ALICE.” – Part 2 | Digital Collections Programme”
If you visit our Digitisation Team, you might be drawn to one of our more curious imaging setups, the ‘Angled Label Image Capture and Extraction’ or to close friends: ALICE.
ALICE came about through the collaboration of Small Orders Curator Dr Ben Price and Digital Collections Project Manager Dr Steen Dupont in order to automate some of the processes to speed up our pinned insect digitisation.
A peculiar setup that used to feature a bucket and six cameras is now a hexagonal light box with cameras that can image pinned insect specimens at multiple angles to digitally extract the attached labels and could provide a breakthrough to an even faster specimen digitisation.
Dr Steen Dupont describes ALICE
I was very excited to start this project as the first test of ALICE’s true potential. What I didn’t expect was that the collection chosen to test ALICE would reveal some stunning wasps and an intriguing untold story of its previous owner. Continue reading ““Mr. Cooper, meet ALICE.” – Part 1 | Digital Collections Programme”
October 22 – 28, 2018 is International Open Access Week during which collections and educational institutions will be discussing the benefits of giving open access to their data. Continue reading “Open Access Week 2018 | Digital Collections Programme”
Seven illustration and reportage graduates and two tutors from the University of the West of England (UWE) recently visited the Digital Collection Programme. We took them behind the scenes showing them our innovative technology and the entomology and botany collection in order to inspire their love of nature. In return, the artists renewed our creativity and enabled us to see our work with fresh eyes.
‘Witnessing the digitisation process was fascinating and knowing about the digital archive means I have a vast and rich resource to access’ Jay Simpson, UWE graduate
Continue reading “Illustrating our Collections | Digital Collections Programme”
After digitising our parasitic lice, we were looking for another microscope slide collection to digitise using the same methodology, having cut down our imaging time for each slide to 14 seconds. So when the opportunity to digitise the beautiful psyllid slide collection arose, we jumped at the chance. Continue reading “Digitising our jumping plant lice | Digital Collection Programme”
The Museum’s Digital Collections Programme (DCP) was represented at a recent John Ellerman funded Strategy Workshop for UK collections at M Shed in Bristol. The event, coordinated by Isla Gladstone of Bristol City Council Culture Team, brought together a range professionals from across UK museums and related sectors including the UK biological recording community, policy specialists, the BBC Natural History unit and informaticians to discuss the development of a coordinated approach to digitising UK regional museum collections. Continue reading “Borderless Collections – Starting a Collections Community (R)evolution | Digital Collections Programme”
The Digital Collections Programme has completed four crowdsourcing projects in 2017. We wanted to say a massive thank-you to the 2,000+ volunteers who together have helped us to capture data from over 15,000 specimens this year. You have made a significant contribution to Science.
We can digitally image individual microscope slides at a rate of up to 1000 slides per day, but we still need help with capturing the label information on each slide. Transcription is an essential part of our digitisation process.
Continue reading “Crowdsourcing our data in 2017 | Digital Collections Programme”
We are currently digitising the Madagascan Lepidoptera collection, a project that has been supported by John Franks and the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust.
The specimens imaged are ‘Types’ – specimens from which the relevant species was named and described.