Team news
Our technical intern is now officially a DaSSCo employee from 1st June 2024. His contract is for 1 year. He is continuing the work from his student project which involved connecting and synchronising programs developed by DaSSCo as part of automated data pipelines.
Likewise we extended the contract with our IT student assistant until the end of November 2024. He will be helping update our ingestion client and server which moves our images from the digitiser workstations, along with core metadata, to our integration server. The integration server then co-ordinates the processing and storage of the images.
One of our digitisers has been appointed as the DaSSCo Senior Digitiser (Development) working to help develop new workstations and workflows and to refine our existing ones, as well as continuing to test them.
Digitisation news
With two entomology workstations up and running at NHMD, Entomology Collection Managers have now joined forces with the DaSSCo digitisers in digitising Dung Beetles and Lepidoptera (mostly Sphingidae and Lasiocampidae) on simplified Pinned Insect workstations. Entomology Collections Managers have also begun imaging Danish Butterflies using these workstations.
For the Herbarium, digitisation has carried on at a steady pace on the first workstation. A second workstation has been set up and is being piloted this summer ahead of a training day on 8 August for Botany Collections Managers.
We have digitised just under 50,000 specimens using the DaSSCo workstations as of the end of June 2024 (around 146 specimens per hour on average).
Development news
Natural History Museum Denmark (NHMD) have been working closely with the project managers at Natural History Museum Aarhus (NHMA) and Science Museums Aarhus University (SMAU) to set up their workstations to start digitisation. We have encountered multiple minor “teething” issues, which we have been solving one by one.
Our Technical Team Leader, Senior Digitiser for Development and one of our digitisers have been working on getting a second herbarium workstation up and running at NHMD.
Two other digitisers based at NHMD have been working on looking at the day-to-day data issues that arise during the course of digitisation and have been helping develop import protocols to deal with them. One has been reviewing and refining the GREL script used for post-processing of data in OpenRefine and the other has been busily updating the digitisation training guides based on feedback.
DaSSCo’s IT Lead has been leading on work to develop a basic user interface in order to search and view images (and associated metadata) in our storage in association with IT consultants.
The DaSSCo Steering Group agreed at their June 2024 meeting to adapt and test a piece of software that we will use initially to capture information from specimen labels. More information on this soon.
Other news
Our Technical Team Leader was at the 2+3D conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands at the end of May. The conference brings together professionals from the museum world and the talks cover how different institutions approach similar challenges through tailored workflows and practices .
She attended a couple of workshops related to colour management and says that it was a great opportunity to make new contacts with imaging professionals, who face some of the same obstacles we do here at DaSSCo.
An update on DaSSCo featured on DiSSCo’s website in April. Check it out here.
