Putting your finger upon the simplest data

Abstract

Over the past decades, digitization endeavors across many institutions holding natural history collections (NHCs) have multiplied with three broad aims: first, to facilitate collection management by moving existing analog catalogues into digital form; second, to efficiently document and inventory specimens in collections, including imaging them as taxonomical surrogates; and third, to enable discovery of, and access to, the resulting collection data.

NHCs contain a unique wealth of potential knowledge in the form of primary biodiversity data records (PBR): at its most basic level, the ¿what, where and when¿ of occurrences of the specimens in the collections. But as T.S. Eliot famously said, ¿knowledge is invariably a matter of degree¿. For such data to be transformed into digitally accessible knowledge (DAK) that is conducive to an understanding about how the natural world works, release of digitized data (the ¿this we know¿) is necessary.

At least two billion specimens are estimated to exist in NHCs already, but only a small fraction can be considered properly DAK: most have either not been digitized yet, or not released through a discovery facility. Digitizing is relatively costly as it often entails manually processing each specimen unit (e.g. a herbarium sheet, a pinned insect, or a vial full of invertebrates). How long could it take us to transform all NHCs into DAK? Can we keep up with the natural growth in collections?