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The Himalayan region is recognised as one of the 'hottest' global Biodiversity hotspots, with a third of all species within its range occurring in Nepal. The documentation of the Flora of Nepal is therefore of great importance both nationally and internationally (National Herbarium & Plant Laboratories (KATH) 2019). The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) leads the Flora of Nepal project in collaboration with the Department of Plant Resources (DPR, part of the Ministry of Forests and Environment), Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University (CDB-TU) and the Society of Himalayan Botany, Tokyo (SHB) (Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh 2014). The National Herbarium and Plant Laboratories (KATH), Kathmandu, Nepal – part of DPR – contains approximately 165,000 herbarium specimens, representing 50% of vascular plant species and 25% of lower plant species known to exist in Nepal. The digitisation of herbarium specimens held at KATH will facilitate access to specimen data, expedite the flora writing process, and make it possible to update species distributions to inform conservation priorities. The existing rate of digitisation was slow with 70-75 specimens being fully digitised a day by three digitisers. Specimen collection labels were fully databased in a Microsoft Access database and imaged at 600 PPI using a single Herbscan. At the current rate of digitisation it will take 7 – 8 years to completely digitise the KATH herbarium. As part of the Darwin Initiative project: Science-based interventions reversing negative impacts of invasive plants in Nepal (http://www.darwininitiative.org.uk/project/23031), a new camera imaging set-up and workflow was devised at RBGE, with installation and staff training provided on-site at KATH herbarium (Fig. 1). This has almost tripled the rate of digitisation to 180-200 specimens per day. The decision making processes that took place regarding hardware and software are discussed including: speed versus quality, some on-site considerations, the installation process and the proposals put forward to further improve the rate of digitisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitisation of specimens at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) has created nearly half a million imaged specimens. With data entry from the specimen labels on herbarium sheets identified as the rate-limiting step in the digitisation workflow, the majority of specimens are databased with minimal data (filing name and geographical region), leaving a need to add further label data (collector, collecting locality, collection date etc.) to make the specimens research ready. We are exploring a number of different ways to complete data entry for specimens that have been imaged. These have included Optical Character Recognition (OCR), to identify meaningful specimen groupings to increase the speed of data entry and more recently citizen science platforms to provide accurate crowdsourced transcriptions of specimen label data. We sent specimen images of the Australian flowering plants held at RBGE herbarium to DigiVol (https://volunteer.ala.org.au/institution/ index/21309224), the citizen science platform developed alongside The Atlas of Living Australia. In 29 expeditions, 156 citizen scientists completed collection label data entry for RBGE's 41,000 specimens of Australian flowering plants. We found that 95% of the transcriptions were completed by less than a third (27%) of the volunteers. Of the four volunteer experience levels in DigiVol we found that the middle two, Collection Managers and Scientists, transcribed fewer specimens, but also made fewer mistakes. We found that by removing the filing name from the information provided with the expedition the number of errors in the Museum Details section of the transcription decreased, as the filing name was often added as the label name, regardless of whether this is the case. The feedback we provided for each expedition was used to highlight common errors to try and reduce their occurrence as well as to inform the volunteers of what their transcriptions had revealed about this part of the collection. We explore the citizen science transcription workflow, its rate-limiting steps and how we have worked to include the citizen science and OCR data on our online herbarium catalogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in digitisation technologies and equipment have enabled advances in the rate of natural history specimen digitisation. However Europe's Natural History Collection Institutions are home to over one billion specimens and currently only a small fraction of these have been digitally catalogued with fewer imaged. It is clear that institutions still face huge challenges when digitising the vast number of specimens in their collections. I will present the results of two surveys that aimed to discover the main successes and challenges facing institutions in their digitisation programmes. The first survey was undertaken in 2014 within the SYNTHESYS 3 project and gathered information from project partners on their current digitisation facilities, equipment and workflows providing some key recommendations based on these findings. The second survey was completed more recently in 2017, through the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) Digitisation Working Group. This survey aimed to discover the successful protocols and implementation of digitisation, and to identify the shortfalls in resources and protocols. Results from both surveys will be fed into the future programme of the CETAF Digitisation Working Group as well as forthcoming and proposed EU projects, including Innovation and Consolidation for large-scale Digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transcription of natural history collection labels is occurring via a variety of different methods - in-house curators, commercial operations, citizen scientists, visiting researchers, linked data, optical character recognition (OCR), handwritten text recognition (HTR), etc., but what can a collections data manager do with this flood of data? There are a whole raft of questions around this incoming data stream - who values it, who needs it, where is it stored, where is it displayed, who has access to it, etc. This talk plans to address these topics with reference to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh herbarium dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]