Is there a way to keep track of all the items held in natural history museums?
But this lack of connection might be a thing of the past. A paper published in the journallast week describes how a dozen large museums came together to map the entire collections of 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums across 28 countries in order to figure out what digital infrastructure is needed to establish a global inventory survey.
“There is no single shared portal covering the breadth of life, Earth, and anthropological specimens in natural history collections, nor a way for researchers to link these data with other sources of information,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “We envision a coordinated strategy for the global collection that is based on strategic collecting, increased digitization, new technologies, and enhanced networking and coordination of museums.
“Until now, it has been difficult to enumerate or compare the complete contents of large museums because their collections are not fully digitized, and the terminology used to describe subcollections is variable,” they wrote. This, they think, is due to the fact that most museums operate independently, and do not have the data structure needed to provide open access to the outside.
“Most of the collection information that we surveyed is not digitally accessible: Only 16% of the objects have digitally discoverable records, and only 0.2% of biological collections have accessible genomic records,” they added.Nico Garstman / Naturalis Biodiversity Center Therefore, for the purpose of this survey, they came up with a common vocabulary for the types of objects, and the collections or geographic source areas they can be categorized into. They ran this methodology with all 73 museums, going through 1,147,934,687 specimens in total. You can see the breakdown in an
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