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Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
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Sarah Phillips‡, Elspeth Haston§, Laura Green‡, Marie-Helene Weech‡, Robert Cubey§, Sally King§, Robyn Drinkwater§
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Corresponding author: Sarah Phillips (sarah.phillips@kew.org)
Received: 18 Apr 2018 | Published: 21 May 2018
© 2018 Sarah Phillips, Elspeth Haston, Laura Green, Marie-Helene Weech, Robert Cubey, Sally King, Robyn Drinkwater
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Phillips S, Haston E, Green L, Weech M, Cubey R, King S, Drinkwater R (2018) State of Digitisation and Gap Analysis Surveys. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2: e25969. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.2.25969
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Abstract
Recent developments in digitisation technologies and equipment have enabled advances in the rate of natural history specimen digitisation. However Europe’s Natural History Collection Institutions are home to over one billion specimens and currently only a small fraction of these have been digitally catalogued with fewer imaged. It is clear that institutions still face huge challenges when digitising the vast number of specimens in their collections.
I will present the results of two surveys that aimed to discover the main successes and challenges facing institutions in their digitisation programmes. The first survey was undertaken in 2014 within the SYNTHESYS 3 project and gathered information from project partners on their current digitisation facilities, equipment and workflows providing some key recommendations based on these findings. The second survey was completed more recently in 2017, through the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) Digitisation Working Group. This survey aimed to discover the successful protocols and implementation of digitisation, and to identify the shortfalls in resources and protocols. Results from both surveys will be fed into the future programme of the CETAF Digitisation Working Group as well as forthcoming and proposed EU projects, including Innovation and Consolidation for large-scale Digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG).
Presenting author
Sarah Phillips