Speaker
Descrizione
The ITINERIS project (WP6 6.4 activity) supported DiSSCo’s vision by prioritising digitisation of Natural History Collections to enable access to biodiversity data.
The resources were primarily allocated to infrastructural works and acquisition of equipment to carry out and support digitisation activities. Three fixed-term technicians were hired to handle the digitisation of both zoological and botanical specimens, focusing mainly on the collections of Florence University Museal System (UNIFI-SMA) and then on a major entomological collection at the University of Naples Federico II through a digitisation campaign. The photographic tools have also been made available to interested institutions holding natural history collections by means of loan agreements, in order to extend digitisation activities throughout Italy. Furthermore some equipment was shared with four fellowship holders involved in a parallel digitisation project funded by the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC), leading to the digitisation of a further quota of botanical and zoological collections at UNIFI-SMA.
As part of the project, free training courses on the digitisation of natural history collections were offered to curators from other institutions, with the aim of promoting and encouraging digitisation.
The target of 300,000 digitised specimens and 90,000 transcribed labels has been reached and exceeded, specifically 397,496 biological specimens have been imaged by internal staff and filed at Minimum Information on Digital Specimen level 1 (MIDS1) and partially 2 (MIDS2). This process brings “collateral benefits” to the collections and will make the work of the curators easier.
Thanks to CNR-IBBR-BA as a host, we were able to start the publication of the datasets arranged in Darwin Core standard according to the guidelines for the “Occurrences-type” dataset in the GBIF portal. The publication on GBIF continues, making a wealth of data on specimens truly open and fair.
