Bringing collections out of the dark

Natural history collections are an incomparable treasure and source of knowledge. Collected over centuries of field exploration, these repositories contain a sample of the world’s biodiversity, and represent a monumental societal investment in research and applied environmental science (Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance 2010). Knowledge derived from the 1.5–3 billion specimens (Ariño 2010, Duckworth et al. 1993) within these collections has made vital contributions to the study of taxonomy, systematics, invasive species, biological conservation, land management, pollination and biotic responses to climate change (Chapman 2005). Despite these activities, natural history collections are significantly underutilised due to the difficulty of obtaining and analysing data within and across collections. Digitisation and mobilisation of specimen and associated data removes this impediment, but presents major technical and organisational challenges. The largest of these is how to capture specimen data fast enough to achieve digitisation of entire collections while maintaining sufficient data quality. Until recently, episodic and incremental funding has had limited success with natural history digitisation, largely addressing local projects within single institutions or across niche research communities. New funding, coupled with more collaborative approaches to digitisation, and technical advances with scanning and imaging systems have begun to change this. The collection of eighteen articles published here examines some of these developments, providing a snapshot of current digitisation efforts and progress across these themes. ZooKeys 209: 1–6 (2012)