iCollections – Digitising the British and Irish Butterflies in the Natural History Museum, London

Abstract

BackgroundThe Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collections . The first phase of this programme has been to undertake a series of pilot projects that will develop the necessary workflows and infrastructure development needed to support mass digitisation of very large scientific collections. This paper presents the results of one of the pilot projects – iCollections. This project digitised all the lepidopteran specimens usually considered as butterflies, 181,545 specimens representing 89 species from the British Isles and Ireland. The data digitised includes, species name, georeferenced location, collector and collection date - the what, where, who and when of specimen data. In addition, a digital image of each specimen was taken. This paper explains the way the data were obtained and the background to the collections which made up the project.New informationSpecimen-level data associated with British and Irish butterfly specimens have not been available before and the iCollections project has released this valuable resource through the NHM data portal.

The influence of life history traits on the phenological response of British butterflies to climate variability since the late‐19th century

“…The data used in this study were all derived from the British butterfly collection held at the NHM. Each of the approximately 183 000 British butterfly specimens held in the NHM collections and the associated data labels have been digitally imaged and the data on the labels transcribed to a database, and imported into the NHM collection database KeEMU (Blagoderov et al 2012, Paterson et al 2016. The specimens have all been reliably identified to species by specialist lepidopterists.…”

iCollections methodology: workflow, results and lessons learned

“…Processed records and corresponding images were ingested into the NHM’s collection management system (CMS), KE EMu (© Axiell), and published through the NHM data portal ( http://data.nhm.ac.uk , Paterson et al 2016b , Paterson et al 2016 ). Flowcharts were prepared using inShort software ver.…”

ALICE: Angled Label Image Capture and Extraction for high throughput insect specimen digitisation

“…Digitisation of insects currently takes three primary approaches: (1) data capture through direct transcription, without imaging; (2) whole drawer scanning (e.g: Blagoderov et al, 2012;Dietrich et al, 2012;Hudson et al, 2015); and (3) single specimen imaging with label capture (e.g: Paterson et al, 2016;Blagoderov et al, 2017), with or without immediate transcription. Direct transcription is ratelimited by physical access to the collection, and crucially data cannot be checked without examining the specimen labels again.…”

“…Current single specimen label imaging methods require removal of the labels from the pinned specimen (eg. the iCollections project: Paterson et al, 2016;Blagoderov et al, 2017). This specimen preparation can comprise ~50% of the time taken to digitise each specimen (Blagoderov et al, 2017), increases the specimen handling and thus the risk of specimen damage.…”