A digitization workflow of dry-pinned collections of Lepidoptera

Abstract

Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) are one of the most commonly found insect groups in museum collections. Yet many specimens still lack digital data and few digitization workflows are available. Here we present a digitization workflow for natural history collections that can be widely applicable for any museum or dried pinned-specimen collection of Lepidoptera. Our workflow consists of pre-imaging preparation, usage of a copy stand for imaging pinned specimens and data labels, image processing, and transcription, the latter two which utilize Python scripts for optimization.