The Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands is crowdsourcing cataloguing of the digitization of their collection. Also from the recent MCN Conference:
"Digitizing Nature with a Live Audience Speakers: Maarten Heerlien<http://wired.ivvy.com/event/MCN13/speaker#62610>, Kirsten Van Hulsen <http://wired.ivvy.com/event/MCN13/speaker#63094> With roughly 37 million biological and geological specimens, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the national museum of natural history of the Netherlands, maintains one of the five largest natural history collections in the world. To make this collection accessible to scientists, students, and nature enthusiasts worldwide, Naturalis is carrying out a large-scale program to digitize a cross-section of seven million objects ranging from mounted specimens and herbarium sheets to fossils and antique nature books, and from mammoths to mites. The results of these efforts are published online through Europeana and other aggregators, and from the end of 2013 through Naturalis's new online biodiversity portal. Museum visitors in Leiden can witness the process of specimen digitization, and even engage in it, in the exhibition space called LiveScience. We will introduce the program, its background, and its goals with a short video. Then we will elaborate on the concept of live digitization and the motivations for it, talk about the challenges we meet, and conclude by discussing concrete results we've harvested while digitizing collections in front of a live audience of visitors and getting them to engage in the digitization process themselves." I'm sure they'd be happy to discuss the project with you. - Douglas -- Douglas Hegley Director of Technology Minneapolis Institute of Arts 2400 Third Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55404 (612) 870-3072 | dhegley at artsmia.org | www.artsmia.org
