A Novel Automated Mass Digitisation Workflow for Natural History Microscope Slides
Name:
A Novel Automated Mass Digitisation ...
Size:
4.232Mb
Format:
PDF
Description:
Published/publisher's PDF version
Average rating
Cast your vote
You can rate an item by clicking the amount of stars they wish to award to
this item.
When enough users have cast their vote on this item, the average rating will also be shown.
Star rating
Your vote was cast
Thank you for your feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Issue date
2019-03-01Submitted date
2020-03-31Subject Terms
mass digitisationautomation
microscope slides
Phthiraptera
Data Matrix barcodes
natural history collections
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The Natural History Museum, London (NHM) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collections. One aim of the programme has been to improve the workflows and infrastructure needed to support high-throughput digitisation and create comprehensive digital inventories of large scientific collections. This paper presents the workflow developed to digitise the entire Phthiraptera (parasitic lice) microscope slide collection (70,663 slides). Here we describe a novel process of semi-automated mass digitisation using both temporary and permanent barcode labels applied before and during slide imaging. By using a series of barcodes encoding information associated with each slide (i.e. unique identifier, location in the collection and taxonomic name), we can run a series of automated processes, including file renaming, image processing and bulk import into the NHM’s collection management system. We provide data on the comparative efficiency of these processes, illustrating how simple activities, like automated file renaming, reduces image post-processing time, minimises human error and can be applied across multiple collection types.Citation
Allan E, Livermore L, Price B, Shchedrina O, Smith V (2019) A Novel Automated Mass Digitisation Workflow for Natural History Microscope Slides. Biodiversity Data Journal 7: e32342. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.7.e32342Publisher
Pensoft PublishersJournal
Biodiversity Data JournalType
Journal ArticleItem Description
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published pdf.NHM Repository
ISSN
1314-2836EISSN
1314-2828ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3897/bdj.7.e32342
Scopus Count
Collections