Digitising slide collections

A project to create workflows and data pipelines for high-throughput, digitisation of the museum’s diverse slide collections.

We are using state-of-the-art equipment to capture images and extract data from a selection of our microscopic slides collection.

The pilot is to design workflows for 2 microscope slide digitisation workflows:

Broad and thin mass digitisation for all 100,000 slides being imaged
High magnification imagery for 20% of these slides including transcription needed for specific research projects

Method

The pilot project is split into 2 main workflows:

High throughput

This is the broad and thin high-throughput approach to digitisation.We have digitised 100,000 slides using the SatScan

A unique identifier (barcode) was attached to each slidea taxonomy and location record wasin the Museum's collections management system with Using Inselect

High resolution

Images needed for research on the actual specimen not just the data. Approx 20% of the slides will go through the high resolution Axioscan at 5x magnification and be fully transcribed by a digitiser.

Project summary

Focus: To develop workflows for the digitisation of microscope slides within our collections
Funding: NERC / Natural History Museum
Start date: 2015
End date: 2016