DigiVol: Our first blog post

The Rapid Digitisation Project (RDP), funded by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), makes label data accessible without needing to go to the physical collection.

The Digitisation Project has now been up and running with volunteers since May of this year and has recently received an extension of funding.

This is our first blog post and we are hoping to share information on what’s happening in the project and what our volunteers have been busy imaging. We plan to showcase our volunteer’s fabulous work and provide some links to the species that we are working on.

We are currently working on the Entomology collection. Entomology was chosen initially because that collection has a huge number of undigitised specimens in a form (dry pinned) that are amenable to imaging and transcribing. Our volunteers have currently digitised more than 8000 specimens and have recently completed the cicadas. We are currently working on the hawk moths and leaf hoppers.

We are also working on the Archive collection and have nearly finished digitising all of the museum's Registers including the Palmer register from 1877 (the Museums first systematic cataloguing recording of specimens). With news of our recent funding extension we will be exploring the digitising of other collections.