Team News
We welcomed to our team a digitiser at Science Museums Aarhus University (AU) on August 15th 2024. Then on September 1st we welcomed our new Senior Data Digitiser at Natural History Museum Denmark (NHMD).
Digitisation News
In early August at NHMD we conducted Herbarium Sheet Digitisation training with Collections Managers at Priorparken. Following the training, the Collections Managers will be working alongside digitisers before continuing solo digitisation work on their own.
The Digital Section at NHMD (where DaSSCo is embedded) paused work to hold a sectional training day on August 30th, featuring workshops on both technical and practical aspects of their jobs. The morning sessions covered topics like basic programming, copyright, IT security, and APIs, while afternoon workshops focused on Specify 7, GitHub project management, file handling, and quality assessment of imaging. The day began with a welcome discussion over cake and ended with a social gathering, providing valuable opportunities for knowledge sharing and team building amongst the section.
Development News
We have been working with an external consultant to work on our transcription platform from August on. He is based in Portugal and had previously developed the software for the Coimbra Herbarium. He is now working closely with NHMD people to adapt it for DaSSCo needs. Users will be able to transcribe specimen records while the platform automatically tracks their experience level through a points system. If enough users agree on transcribed values (enough points are collected), the data is automatically validated. Validated data is transferred to Specify through an API. This platform will help streamline the digitisation process and remove individual effort in the data processing tasks. We hope to build on it in future, incorporating other tools such as automated text recognition.
A part of our NHMD team visited London on September 24th to the 25th to learn about digitisation at the Natural History Museum and the Herbarium of Royal Gardens, Kew. They used this opportunity to look in detail at the NHM’s ALICE set up for imaging pinned insects without removing specimen labels, as we are currently developing something similar. They were able to ask targeted questions to aid with our own workstation and workflow development work and develop some important contacts.
Picture: Our host from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew showing off the digitisation project
Other News
A NHMD employee participated online at the TDWG conference 2024 held in Okinawa, Japan. The conference featured workshops from DiSSCo institutions including the Natural History Museum in London and Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Key topics included digitisation programs, transcription toolkits like VoucherVision, data standardisation and a preview of the upcoming GeoSpecify module. We were able to bring back and cascade knowledge gained at the conference to aid DaSSCo.
At NHMD, the Science and Collections Department hosted a group from Natural History Museum, University of Oslo who visited to observe our collection management system used in DaSSCo. It was a visiting team of 14, who was there to gather inspiration from DaSSCo’s workflows.
The DaSSCo Steering Group met in person on 3rd September 2024 at DTU (one of the DaSSCo Consortium partners). We got a tour of the facilities of relevance to DaSSCo including seeing the CT scanner which we will be incorporating into a DaSSCo pipeline. Discussions at the meeting also centered on promising early results from the synchrotron in Lund. Read more here.
Picture: Steering Group Meeting
Lastly, DaSSCo has been awarded 10 million DKK over the next three years by the Augustinus Foundation. This pilot project will develop the infrastructure for high throughput, high resolution 3D digitisation of NHMD’s vertebrate collection. It will incorporate robotics to automate the scanning process and the development of algorithms to semi-automate the processing required for visualisation and analysis of the data.
