BHL Australia’s mission is to make Australia’s biodiversity literature freely accessible and discoverable. Ten years ago, we started with a single contributing organisation, Museums Victoria, and a team of five incredibly dedicated volunteers. Over the past 10 years, BHL Australia has grown. Our operation is still hosted by Museums Victoria (at the Melbourne Museum), but we now digitise literature (and ingest born-digital material) on behalf of 27 organisations across the country.

We are now a truly national project, representing Australia’s state and territory museums, herbaria, royal societies and field naturalists clubs, as well as government agencies and natural history publishers. Together these organisations have contributed more than 350,000 pages from over 2,400 volumes.

These volumes include treasures such as George Shaw’s The Naturalist’s Miscellany (1789-1813), Helena Forde and Harriet Scott’s Australian lepidoptera and their transformations, drawn from the life (1890-1898) and John Gould’s A synopsis of the birds of Australia, and the adjacent Islands (1837).

This week we’ll be featuring these and other beautiful rare books from our online collection via BHL’s Instagram and the @bhl_au Twitter account. BHL Australia has also uploaded an extensive list of journals onto BHL (they may not be as pretty, but they’re just as important). To peruse all 2,400 volumes, see our full BHL Australia Collection. Our volunteer team has also grown considerably since 2010; BHL Australia now has 15 amazing volunteers who do the majority of our scanning, cropping, image processing and metadata addition work, as well as 3 science communication volunteers. (You may have seen their hugely successful takeover of the BHL Instagram account during #BirdWeek last year.)

Of course, like so many other digitisation operations around the globe, BHL Australia is now in lockdown (and has been since mid-March). But out of adversity comes opportunity. While in lockdown, we’ve switched our focus from physical to born-digital material. We’ve welcomed new contributors and have uploaded journal volumes published as recently as late 2019. We’ve also started a major project (in collaboration with BHL superuser Rod Page) to upload article metadata for every Australian journal on BHL (we’re pretty obsessed with discoverability).  

And, like so many others, we’ve also had to postpone our celebrations. We had planned to invite all our Australian contributors and volunteers to a big BHL birthday bash. That’s on hold for now, but in the meantime, here are our BHL staff – Cerise, Chris, Veronica and myself – waving our thanks to all those who support BHL Australia. To our volunteers, our contributors, the Atlas of Living Australia and our BHL community around the world – thank you for a wonderful 10 years!

The BHL Australia team: Manager Nicole Kearney (top right); Digitisation Coordinators Veronica Scholes (top left) and Cerise Howard (bottom right); and Technician Chris Healey (bottom left).

The Eurobodalla region spans along the NSW south coast and encompasses cool temperate rainforest gullies, seaside dunes, sandstone heaths and tall sclerophyll (trees with hard, short leaves) forests, grasslands and an ancient Gondwana forest. The recent devastating bushfires burnt up to 80% of the Eurobodalla region, including many of the wetter habitats previously untouched by fire. A staggering 33% of the region is currently assessed as being burnt at the highest intensity, with the forest canopy fully affected.

The region is home to many local native species not found anywhere else including the beautiful Monga Waratah (Telopea mongaensis).

The Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden (ERBG) owned and operated by Eurobodalla Shire Council, located in Mogo State Forest just outside of Batemans Bay was severely damaged with many structures burned to the ground. It remains closed to the public. However, the new Wallace Herbarium building (completed in 2019), the ERBG Visitors Centre, the seed collection and the plant nursery survived.

The Herbarium and Visitor Centre were significantly upgraded and extended just before Christmas, including significant fire safety upgrades – these were immediately put to the test.

The Herbarium collection of nearly 15,000 plant specimens was largely built up under the leadership of Jenny Liney, who received an OAM for her outstandiong services to conservation and the environment.  

Alongside her colleagues at the Botanic Garden, she is keen to assess the impact of the fires and monitor recovery of plants in affected areas.

“We are all worried about the impact of these recent fires. The ancient Gondwana forest in the NSW south coast is able to withstand occasional burning of a patchy nature, but it’s possible it might be wiped out by successive fires over a large area. We’re just not sure and need to start assessing the impact,” said Jenny.

Herbarium data updated – now accessible, and research-ready to help assess damage

The full impact of the recent fires on the plants and animals of the Eurobodalla region is yet to be established. The species information and occurrence records that the Wallace Herbarium holds will play a crucial role in assessing the damage.

The Herbarium team recently upgraded the data in order to satisfy the AVH data quality checks. Now, the data is publicly accessible, and ready for researchers, land managers, and the ERBG team, through the Australasian Virtual Herbarium (AVH), a hub of the Atlas of Living Australia.

“Being able to use and view the data in the AVH is invaluable – taxonomists search the AVH to understand what specimens have been collected for a species – unless we are on the AVH our collection would not be on their radar,” said Curator Tricia Kaye.

“The ALA, and the AVH, provide us and our users with invaluable spatial tools to map and analyse data, and will play a crucial role in assessing impact, managing bush recovery and identifying areas of conservation priority.”

Australia-wide species data enhances knowledge of plant distribution

A number of species in the Eurobodalla region are at the southern edge of distribution – this includes the Monga waratah and other threatened plants. Understanding species variation at the edges is often crucial to understanding species as a whole. For the Herbarium team, being able to view their data in the AVH with data from other collections helps to understand where there are gaps and where new collections should be targeted.

“Widespread severe and more frequent fires in this coast region could see the demise of many species including the unique Monga waratah which occurs in a very limited area at the fringes of the rainforest, said Tricia.”

“The long-term impacts need to be studied, along with identification of any areas of special interest that need to be protected from this changed fire pattern – consolidated herbarium data will play a crucial role in understanding change and how to adapt to it.”

About the Australasian Virtual Herbarium (AVH)

The AVH is a specialised subset of the ALA, it brings together more detailed data on plant collections. To date, the AVH has been largely drawn from the major capital city herbaria, which necessarily give a broader picture. Regional collections like the Wallace Herbarium fill in the gaps, providing more detailed coverage over space and time.

“Often more accurate than broader collections, regional data such as ours from the NSW South Coast, can be used to update data from broader collections, and target areas of special interest,” said Tricia.

More information:

• To view the data in the Australasian Virtual Herbarium, view the Wallace Herbarium collection.
• Visit the Eurobodalla Botanic Garden website

Written by Deirdre Coleman (Robert Wallace Chair of English, University of Melbourne), Nik McGrath (Archivist, Museums Victoria), and Simon Hinkley (Entomologist, Museums Victoria).

The George Lyell Collection

At the start of 2019, our multidisciplinary team working from the Museums Victoria Archives began a McCoy Seed Fund project focussed on the George Lyell Collection.

This collection at Museums Victoria includes almost 12,000 butterflies and 40,000 moths, donated by Lyell between 1932 and 1946. The Museums Victoria Archives is also the repository of Lyell’s correspondence with collectors and scientists from around Australia and overseas. Field notebooks, letter books, the photograph of Lyell as a young man at the head of this note, plus his index book (1891–1951) are also held in the Archives, together with a draft manuscript of The Butterflies of Australia, the book he co-published with G. A. Waterhouse in 1914.

Committed and devoted lepidopterist

George Lyell (1866-1951) moved to Gisborne in rural Victoria in 1890 when he was 24 years old, having been offered a job at the timber merchants firm, Cherry & Sons. Gisborne would be Lyell’s home until his death in 1951. Despite full-time work and eventual partner responsibilities, Lyell devoted time to long walks in pursuit of insect and orchid specimens. When he fell ill in 1932 he decided it was time to begin arranging for his moth and butterfly collection to be donated to what was then called the National Museum of Victoria. He was to live for almost another two decades, which was just as well considering the mammoth task of amalgamating his extensive insect collection with the Museum’s much smaller holdings. Between 1932 and 1946 Lyell dedicated himself to the laborious work of transferring, rearranging, rehousing, and documenting his Lepidoptera collection. He also built cabinets and drawers, and arranged transportation of these items by train between Gisborne and Melbourne. Whenever free from Cherry & Sons, such as at evenings and weekends, he dedicated every moment to getting his donation ready, a task which often involved re-setting and re-labelling individual specimens.

Lyell and Dodd: letters between leading lepidopterists

Collecting insects was serious business in the late nineteenth century, involving a remarkable number of people and a brisk and lively circulation of letters and specimen boxes. Frederick Parkhurst Dodd was a full-time insect dealer whose detailed and gossipy letters to Lyell, from 1897 to 1904, provide us with major insights into the increasing professionalisation of entomology in this period. Dodd and Lyell were great admirers of each other’s perfectionist skills in preparing and pinning specimens. In their correspondence they exchanged information and tips about all aspects of their craft, including how to avoid the insects becoming ‘greasy’ (Museums Victoria Archives, OLDERSYSTEM~03023). Dr Geoff Monteith, author of The Butterfly Man of Kuranda, Frederick Parkhurst Dodd (1991), tells us that Dodd’s magnificently arranged cases of insects, created a century ago and held in the Queensland Museum, are free from ‘greasy’ complications.

Tales from our study of a well curated collection

A study of the ways in which a collection like Lyell’s both depended upon and reflected changing social and institutional networks is central to our study. Insects operated as social currency, making and breaking relationships. Issues of trust as well as the codes of honour governing the entomological community are evident in the correspondence, with rhetorical and other strategies—such as specimen exchange, donation, and sale—enhancing entomological authority, credibility, and expertise. There are many notable figures mentioned in the letters we have transcribed from Dodd to Lyell: Frank Spry, James Kershaw, Dr Alfred Jefferis Turner, Oswald Lower, C. G. Llewellyn Gooding, A. Mason, Archibald James Campbell, Sidney W. Jackson and Henry Luke White. Unlike Lyell, whose focus was principally local, Dodd traded internationally, selling many thousands of insects to the British Museum and to prominent collectors such as Lord Walter Rothschild of Tring, Lord Thomas Walsingham, Charles Oberthür, James John Joicey, and Colbran Wainwright. Like Lyell, Dodd deserves a higher profile with the public. When he published an article in Tring Museum’s Novitates Zoologicae in 1906, Rothschild publicly praised him for adding ‘so much to our knowledge of the early stages of Queenslandian Lepidoptera’. Despite intense interest in 19th-century natural history, studies of Australia’s role in what was a global and imperial system are still thin on the ground.

Science as art, art as science

Dodd’s obsessive attention to all aspects of his entomological craft, from capture in the field to perfect preservation and pinning in the workshop, can be seen in the large and showy specimen cases which he took on national tour after World War 1. With one of his sons to help him load and unload the cases from the train, he made several trips from Kuranda, introducing far north Queensland’s tropical entomology to the attention of the general public in the south-eastern states. In these cases, now held in the Queensland Museum, we see how Dodd’s exquisite craftsmanship transformed ‘natural’ specimens into artful creations. In the insect case photographed below Dodd has arranged lepidoptera of various sizes and colours to pick out the following lines in praise of SHE, i.e. Mother Nature, from a popular poem by Henry Longfellow:

And whenever the way seemed long

Or his heart began to fail

SHE would sing a more wonderful song

Or tell a more marvellous tale.

If you had to pick a favourite…

In 1945, after donating his collection to the museum, Lyell was asked which of his 6177 insect species was his favourite. He replied that it was the Queensland wood moth, Dudgeonea actinias, captured by Dodd ‘from a rotting log in a creek bed at Townsville’ (Museums Victoria Archives, ARCHIVE-BOX~579). In 1903 cyclone Leonta buried that particular log under 30 feet of flood debris and no further specimens were sighted until 2015. View the occurrence record for this specimen in the ALA.

Of the original 13 specimens of this rare moth in Museums Victoria, seven are in the Lyell collection. As part of our project one male and one female specimen were selected for images obtained by multi focus stacking, meaning they were photographed a number of times and layered into one image to get as much of the specimen in focus as possible.

More collection secrets to be uncovered in coming months

It has been a privilege to work on the George Lyell Collection, and we look forward to publishing more of our findings about Australian entomologists and entomology in the coming year.

More information

• You can see records collected by George Lyell in Museums Victoria’s collection in ALA using this search: All 6008 records in the George Lyell Collection
• To browse other Australian natural history collections on the ALA view the dataset from the Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums
• For further information about the George Lyell Collection, please contact Deirdre Coleman.

Laurence’s images show a leafcutter bee bringing a piece of cut leaf back to an apparently ‘disused’ underground burrow. But, a predatory wolf spider was already living there. For three days, Laurence watched the leafcutter bee returning with cut leaves and pollen to build and provision her underground shared home. The bee and spider frequently interacted with each other but the spider never showed aggression towards the bee.

Dr Ken Walker, Senior Curator of Entomology at Museums Victoria happened to see the record and realised it was special. After checking with experts across the world, Ken confirmed this was a world-first. This species interaction had never been recorded before.

Ken is interested in the value of digital collections and the added value they can provide the research community and Laurence’s sighting highlights this perfectly.

“Had the specimens been stored only in physical collections, the spider would be in the wet collection separated from the pinned bee in the dry collection and any behavioural interaction would remain unobserved and unrecorded. Digital collections can create new information that is not present in physical collections.”

“I’m also particularly interested in citizen science digital collections and think they have so much to add to potential biodiversity discoveries – Laurence’s observation showcases the value that ALA’s digital infrastructure and citizen scientists can make to biodiversity research and species discovery,” said Ken.

Occurrence records in the ALA

Biodiversity information in the ALA is mostly based on occurrence records from field observations, surveys and specimen collections aggregated from researchers, land managers, government agencies and natural history collections. Records contain location, date and time of sighting, and many have image, video or sound recording files and notes. In early 2018, there is over 73 million records for over 120,000 species across Australia.

The ALA supports initiatives to digitise physical collections (such as DigiVol), encourages data owners to upload existing data sets and also invites citizen scientists to record sightings. Once in the ALA, the information is freely available online to everyone – researchers, government, industry and the public.

Benefits of digital collections

Two clear benefits of ALA’s digital infrastructure are the ease of sharing and accessing biodiversity data from your desktop or mobile device and the capacity to analyse data sets in many different ways.

However, there are many unforeseen benefits of digital collections that go beyond initial expectations, such as greater interaction between different scientific disciplines and the contributions to science made by members of the general public – citizen scientists.

Citizen science and the ALA

The ALA enables all members of society to make real contributions to science.  All data entered into the ALA – be it a large data set from a research group or an individual record of a plant or animal in someone’s backyard or neighbourhood – help provide an ever more detailed picture of Australia’s biodiversity. If you would like to start recording the biodiversity you see in your area, go to Record a sighting.

The ALA also supports citizen science projects through the Australian Citizen Science Project finder on our BioCollect field data collection platform. In this portal you can search for and participate in citizen science projects across Australia, as well as create and run your own biodiversity projects.

For more information about citizen science and the ALA visit Citizen Science Central.

WeDigBio, short for Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Bio-collections, is a four-day global event taking place during October 22-25 2015, that will engage participants in transcribing biodiversity research collections. The public can join WeDigBio and scientists from around the world to transform biodiversity collections data into a worldwide resource that will enhance the span of biodiversity research across time, taxa, and geographies.

The WeDigBio event emerged within the museum community to increase the rate of digital data creation. This one-of-a-kind event will be held across 30 locations across the globe, but you don’t have to be at one of these locations to get involved.

Through the DigiVol portal, the Australian Museum will be joining in on the WeDigBio fun this year and they’ll be looking for volunteers online and onsite to join the blitz.

The Australian Museum has more than 18 million specimens hidden within its buildings. The labels that are attached to these specimens contain data that is important in the study of the diversity of plants and animals. Many of these specimens do not have a digital record attached to them, making this information unavailable to researchers and scientists, but with the help of Citizen Scientists these specimens are receiving the digitisation treatment.

For those in Sydney, you can join in the fun at the Australian Museum as they will be holding a free admission, onsite transcription event on Saturday 24 October. Bring your laptop and join the team for coffee and cake and an afternoon of transcribing, you can learn how to use DigiVol and explore other transcriptions sites from around the world. For further information and registration for the Sydney event please email: DigiVol@austmus.gov.au

Biodiversity data transcribed through the DigiVol is uploaded to the Atlas of Living Australia for future research use and to support biodiversity knowledge.

If you would like to get involved in WeDigBio online, please visit WeDigBio or DigiVol for further instruction.

Given that the Magpie Fiddler Ray is listed as threatened by the IUCN Red List, and immature male fiddlers are common in prawn trawl bycatch, it was important to clear this up. Clarifying whether it was a different species would have an impact on its conservation status and approach to management.

Conservation management of naturally rare or seldom encountered fish can be tricky, as documenting changes to abundance can be a challenging task. The Magpie Fiddler Ray was considered to be genuinely rare, not just hard to observe, because all known specimens were found in shallow waters of the well-populated and frequently trawled coastlines of the Gulf of St Vincent and Kangaroo Island.

DNA analysis would have resolved the issue once and for all. However scientists were thwarted by a lack of specimens suitable for DNA analysis and its apparent rarity as the Magpie Fiddler Ray was known, until recently, from only a single specimen deposited in the South Australian Museum over 60 years ago.

Scientists couldn’t wait 60 years for another Magpie Fiddler Ray to show up, so the South Australian Museum turned to the citizen scientist community for help. From 2001 it issued calls through the media and recreational fishing websites for people to watch out for specimens of this elusive but easily recognised species.

Those calls were successful, with two specimens and three new photographic records of the Magpie Fiddler Ray coming through from the recreational fishing community between 2001 and 2013. Surprisingly, most were from the Adelaide suburban coast and the Port River.

This gave the team enough material to work with. They used the latest DNA sequencing technology to compare the genome of these new Magpie Fiddler Ray specimens with 50 specimens of the Southern Fiddler Ray. They also analysed examples of the Eastern Fiddler Ray, to provide a ‘yardstick’ for the between species. All comparative samples were drawn from the South Australian Museum’s phenomenal Australian Biological Tissue Collection, the largest in the southern hemisphere, with more than 138,000 animal tissues available for genetic analysis collected over five decades.

Genetic analysis of the specimens showed very clear results. The Southern and Eastern Fiddler Rays were clearly highly distinct, and in contrast the two Magpie Fiddler Ray specimens were obviously members of the Southern Fiddler Ray gene pool.

Scientists simultaneously re-examined the appearance of these rays, including their shape, length and skin features but found no significant differences apart from the colour pattern. The strongly black and white pattern of the Magpie Fiddler Ray could be attributed to ‘leucism’, a condition that results in loss of pigmentation that isn’t uncommon in many kinds of fishes and other vertebrates.

And so the team was able to demonstrate that the Magpie Fiddler Ray, isn’t its own species at all, but is a colour variation of the common and widespread Southern Fiddler Ray. They published their results in the scientific journal “Zootaxa” in July 2015. Distribution maps of the Fiddler Ray species based on museum collection records from all over the country, are available through the Atlas of Living Australia.

Professor Steve Donnellan, Chief Research Scientist at the South Australian Museum’s Evolutionary Biology Unit commented that “this is the sort of science that museum researchers love doing, it involves interested members of the public to solve long-standing mysteries and of course we couldn’t do it without the efforts of many people over many decades accumulating invaluable specimens, tissues and records in our museums. It’s this sort of approach involving focused public partnerships that we like to use increasingly to solve issues in our fish research program.”

Invasive plants are estimated to cost the Australian economy over $4 billion a year through lost production and increased control costs.  They have also been linked to the extinction of several endangered species.  Understanding how invasive species are introduced into Australia helps put steps in place to prevent them getting here in the first place.

Australia’s Virtual Herbarium (AVH) brings together specimen data from many of Australia’s herbaria (specialised museums that house collections of dried plants, algae and fungi) and makes it freely available on the web, providing the most complete and up-to-date picture of Australia’s botanical diversity available.

Researchers from a joint project between the University of Melbourne and the Victorian Government used the data stored with each plant specimen to pinpoint where and when species were found in Australia for the first time.  By matching this with information about where else in the world the species was found, and what types of things people used the species for, the researchers were able to estimate the species most likely pathway of introduction into Australia.

“What we found was that the pathways of introduction have diversified substantially over the last 150 years.  In the early years after European settlement, we saw mostly grasses and legumes used for food or fodder arrive from Europe, whereas the species arriving now come from all corners of the globe for mostly ornamental purposes”, said Aaron Dodd, the lead author of the study.

Large-scale research projects like this one demonstrate the importance of expertly identified, specimen-based records for research and how this information can be used to inform areas other than plant taxonomy.  Such projects have only become possible through the recent digitisation of the physical specimens held by herbaria and the sharing of that information via portals such as AVH and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

Research Links:

The original research described in the article is available from the journal Diversity and Distributions.

The National Reserve System forms a network of more than 9000 properties, covering more than 11 per cent of the continent, including national parks run by all levels of government, lands managed by Indigenous owners and non-profit organisations, and parts of working properties managed for conservation by farmers.

Bush Blitz began in 2010 and has conducted expeditions to diverse areas including Flinders Island in Bass Strait, Queensland’s wet tropics, the Gawler Ranges in South Australia and now to the stunning Judbarra/ Gregory National Park. Over the last five years these expeditions have found more than 900 new species, located 250 threatened species, and recorded 12,000 types of plants and animals in new localities. The latest expedition at Judbarra/ Gregory discovered at least seven new species of spider, including a previously unknown genus of tarantula. Other highlights included a record of one of Australia’s rarest fish, the Neil’s Grunter (Scortum neili) and the first record of the swamp eel from the Victoria River catchment.

While conducting a survey in the field might be the most exciting part of a Bush Blitz, a lot of the work takes place afterwards, as scientists return to museums and herbaria to identify, document and preserve the specimens and data collected, and work towards making new information available to land managers, government agencies and the public. These new specimens and sightings add to more than 30 million records held by museums and herbaria across the country. Museums and other collections play a vital role in preserving these specimens for the use of scientists and the general public, and preserving this invaluable record of our nation’s biodiversity for the future.

Collections are particularly important in species discovery and taxonomy, as type specimens of newly discovered species are lodged in public collections such as museums, so that they are preserved indefinitely, and always accessible for review. Types are the individual specimen whose characteristics are described in the scientific paper naming the new species. Preservation and accessibility of these specimens ensures that future generations of taxonomists can verify identifications and expand our knowledge of the world around us. There are often new species to describe from the trips, either as complete new finds, or key material that contributes to broader detective work that helps uncover how many species are actually present.

Upon their return to the museum, staff prepare each specimen for long term storage, which can include fixing tissues of mammals, fish and reptiles, pinning and drying insects, identifying species,and carefully labelling each specimen.

Once the specimen is safely preserved, museum staff record information such as the identification, location and date of capture in databases, so those data can be used for all sorts of research, including large and small scale ecology, genetic analysis and land management.

This process takes considerable time, but data resulting from the Judbarra/ Gregory National Park Bush Blitz expedition will eventually be published online through the Atlas of Living Australia, for the information of the research community and general public. Bush Blitz records will add to more than 10 million collections-sourced records that form an invaluable resource in our quest to better understand Australia’s biodiversity.

DigiVol enables volunteers from around the world to transcribe handwritten diaries, scientist notebooks and specimen labels, and identify location data – in turn creating a digital record for physical ones. Through DigiVol, volunteers are helping museums and universities to make their research material available to everyone online. The data has many uses but most important is that it can help scientists and planning officials better understand, utilise, manage and conserve Australia’s precious biodiversity.

Paul Flemons is Head of Citizen Science at Australia Museum and the manager of DigiVol, he explains “DigiVol enables the public to contribute to the process of scientific discovery in a way never previously possible. This is invaluable to museums in a time of scarce government funding.”

Each DigiVol project is called an Expedition and can contain a number of pages or specimens that need to be transcribed into a digital version. Megan Edey as the largest contributor to DigiVol has completed over 40,000 tasks! Megan explains more about her work “I like doing both the insect and the diary expeditions on DigiVol. I especially liked working on the Edgar Waite diaries and following his life story. DigiVol is interspersed throughout my day, I sometimes log on in between doing the washing or feeding the horses or whenever the family are watching something boring on TV!  I can be logged on for between 2 and 5 hours a day.”

The unique volunteer experience is explained in this Australian Museum blog “Different volunteers enjoy different tasks, with some of them becoming obsessed with the lives of the diary writers, others with transcribing insect labels. All of their efforts are captured in the DigiVol Honour Board where they aspire to be a Weekly Wonder, Monthly Maestro or DigiVol Legend by transcribing the most tasks weekly, monthly and overall.”

DigiVol and its capability to assist with the enormous task of digitising their collections  is not restricted to Australia’s museums and collections either;  institutions like the Smithsonian, New York Botanic Gardens, and Kew Gardens have also chosen DigiVol to host their own virtual expeditions to digitise their collections.

The University of Melbourne Herbarium is the latest collection institution to join in the DigiVol effort, with their first expedition focusing on legume specimens from the Burnley Horticultural College.

If you’d like to get involved and join DigiVol, simply head to www.volunteer.ala.org.au and there’s a Facebook group too. Happy transcribing!

What do we mean by “digitisation” and why is it important? Digitisation is the act of creating a digital record for an existing physical one. For example, transcribing hand-written specimen tags or photographing old expedition diaries into digital and searchable resources. Digitisation ensures that fragile physical collections be preserved long-term; reducing physical handling of items which would cause deterioration over time or even loss. Allowing these digital versions to be available online is important to global biodiversity research; eliminating the requirement to visit a collection in person, these resources become available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Representatives from across Australia and around the globe converged on the CSIRO Black Mountain site in Canberra to share their knowledge, experience, and thoughts on issues such as: data sharing, digitisation techniques, imaging, new technologies, data visualisation, outreach, public participation, and project management. Participants also had a chance to tour some of the CSIRO collections that are held in Canberra: Australian National Wildlife Collection, Australian National Insect Collection, and neighbouring Australian National Botanic Gardens.

The summit gave stage to representatives from international collections such as the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum of London, and locally the  Australian Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens, SA Museum, and the Marine Biodiversity Hub (just to name a few), to share their current results and future requirements in the global effort to digitise and share records to enable open access in biodiversity knowledge.

After 4 days of presentations and discussions, the workshop participants reached five important conclusions and associated action items, these crucial points and greater detail on the summit program can be investigated further in a recent piece by iDigBio’s Gil Nelson.

Please visit the following link for further information about this event: https://www.idigbio.org/content/digitization-biological-collections-global-focus