iCollections - Digitising the British and Irish Butterflies in the Natural History Museum, London

Abstract

Background The Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collections. The first phase of this programme has been to undertake a series of pilot projects that will develop the necessary workflows and infrastructure development needed to support mass digitisation of very large scientific collections. This paper presents the results of one of the pilot projects - iCollections. This project digitised all the lepidopteran specimens usually considered as butterflies, 181,545 specimens representing 89 species from the British Isles and Ireland. The data digitised includes, species name, georeferenced location, collector and collection date - the what, where, who and when of specimen data. In addition, a digital image of each specimen was taken. This paper explains the way the data were obtained and the background to the collections which made up the project. New information Specimen-level data associated with British and Irish butterfly specimens have not been available before and the iCollections project has released this valuable resource through the NHM data portal.