Towards the end of workflow, the role of data managers increases and that of digitisers and curators decreases. The modules are independent and can be performed sequentially or in parallel. 1): 1) Imaging and re-housing 2) Transcription 3) Georeferencing and 4) Ingest into CMS. The workflow comprises four modules ( Fig. Digitisers change roles periodically to reduce monotony. We found that the most labour intensive and logistically complex stage-imaging and re-housing-was best performed by a pair of digitisers dividing the tasks between them in a sequential-style workflow. Complex procedures were divided into smaller, simpler tasks, thereby allowing optimisation of each stage.
#Icollections lite manual#
In developing the workflow, we aimed to minimise the amount of specimen handling and other manual operations, and increase division of labour. At the same time, we concentrate on the general lessons learned from implementation of this type of large-scale digitisation project. While we deliberately keep descriptions of the various elements general and illustrate the workflow with examples drawn from the NHM collections, other institutions can readily adapt our findings to align with their own internal policies and procedures. The selected process is a variant on the “object-to-image-to-data” workflow ( Nelson et al. Now the most important collection of British and Irish Lepidoptera in existence, containing a wealth of material of both scientific and historic importance, the British and Irish Collection comprised, prior to the iCollections project (2013), approximately 500,000 specimens, of which 130,000 were butterflies, housed in 5500 cork-lined drawers and databased to species level only.Īll data regarding the number of digitised specimens and associated costs are valid as of January 1, 2016. The following year, the RCK was merged with the many other important British and Irish Lepidoptera collections already at the NHM to form the present British and Irish Lepidoptera Collection. Comprising about 2000 drawers of British and Irish butterflies and larger moths arranged to display variation in all its forms, the RCK was originally housed at the Tring Museum but was moved to the Entomology Department of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in South Kensington, London in 1969. The Rothschild-Cockayne-Kettlewell collection, popularly known as the "RCK", was formed in 1947 from the amalgamation of the Rothschild British and Irish butterfly and moth collection with the extensive combined collections of E.A. Processed specimen records and corresponding images are available on the NHM data portal (, Paterson et al. The iCollections project focused on Lepidoptera from the British Isles only however, for comparative purposes, data from another digitisation project – Crop Wild Relatives, which included several groups of Coleoptera, Diptera and Hemiptera – are included. This paper concentrates on details of workflows and the lessons learned, which are fundamental to the design of new digitisation projects ( Nelson et al. 2016b) briefly described the resultant dataset and methodology of digitisation. In addition to the aim of digitising a large collection, iCollections was also established to test the systems that would have to be developed and the ability of the existing infrastructure to deal with relatively large volumes of data in a timely and secure way. The iCollections project was developed as part of this programme with the aim of developing the necessary data pipelines and digitisation workflows to undertake such a mass digitisation project. The Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its entire collections of some 80 million specimens (see for background and details).