Digitising museums faster with a smartphone

An enormous amount of potential knowledge is stored in these archives of biodiversity in space and time. However, only a small part of the information data on our biodiversity has been fully catalogued and is digitally available for global research.

Great efforts are currently being made worldwide to digitise natural history collections together with the associated object information and metadata. Due to the destruction of nature and climate change, masses of species are dying out around the globe without having been scientifically described.

In view of this biodiversity crisis, the global networking of species knowledge is becoming increasingly urgent. However, only 16 per cent of the 1.1 billion objects preserved in the world's 73 largest natural history museums have digitally retrievable data sets - as was recently made public in a study published in the journal Science.

The automatic recording of insect label data plays a central role in digitisation. The writing on their labels measures just a few millimetres. Until now, expensive technical equipment and specially trained personnel were required to read these labels.

The new method now offers a simple, inexpensive alternative: Using a smartphone, machine-written or handwritten labels can be read wirelessly, very easily and quickly, as the authors explain in the tutorial: They skip the step of static image capture of the labels, which is unnecessary for most specimens, and instead read the information on the labels directly into the data memory. They only need a few seconds for a scan. Because fewer images need to be stored, the CO2 footprint of digitisation is also reduced.

For the application, the authors provide alternative process instructions for Android and Apple-based environments as well as protocols for individual and bulk scans. "We expect this type of data acquisition to be a great help for simple, cost-effective and sustainable digitisation in taxonomy and collection management, independent of large industrial digitisation pipelines," emphasises Dirk Ahrens, insect researcher at the LIB's Museum Koenig Bonn. "This method is particularly helpful for amateur scientists or professionals who cannot afford technical assistance."

Museums lend out large quantities of specimens by parcel post all over the world so that the animals can be identified by leading international specialists. "In the background, we have a large helping community in taxonomy. This is precisely why we need more flexible and, above all, simple, cost-effective solutions like this that enable more efficient data processing and accelerate the discovery of biodiversity."

The team of authors Dirk Ahrens, Alexander Haas, Thaynara L. Pacheco and Peter Grobe want to use this method to support the entire scientific community in making biodiversity data accessible. "Taxonomic specialists for insects are rare and their time is extremely valuable. At the same time, there are large numbers of undetermined species," says Ahrens.