2023-10-11 – 09:30-09:50 (Africa/Abidjan), Bazar
The world is in a biodiversity crisis. Due to human activities, plant and animal species are going extinct at a rate of 10-100 times higher than at the last mass extinction event 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs vanished from the earth. To document and understand this loss of species, natural history collections are pivotal. Not only can the data on gathering sites and dates of specimens collected from the late 1600s up until present provide scientists with information about biodiversity change over long periods of time, but the significance of mass extinction for the world's population can be made tangible when broad segments of society are involved in collecting this data. By transcribing handwritten labels to databases, they contribute significantly to making the information available to research, education and outreach.
To engage the public in unlocking the potential of collections on a large scale and as part of mass digitisation efforts, the Natural History Museum Aarhus (Denmark) and Museum für Naturkunde, (Germany) have entered a partnership, funded by the European Union, Erasmus+, to create a professional framework for volunteer projects that gather metadata from specimen labels. In this talk, we present our study of what motivates the volunteers to participate in digitisation projects, how to manage volunteer programs, what pitfalls to avoid and how other cultural institutions can – and should – engage the public in digitisation.
