Projects

1 Mio objects databased within the SwissCollNet projects!

Between April 2022 and August 2024, SwissCollNet financially supported 68 digitization projects in 53 Swiss institutions to the amount of almost 9 Mio CHF. For their part, the institutions have invested more than 10 Mio CHF of matching funds in the projects.

41 of these projects were based on cooperation between the collection institutions and in most cases institutions from several cantons have worked together. The projects, which lasted up to two years, covered a wide range of thematically diverse collections from botany, mycology and zoology to palaeontology, geology or anthropology.

Objects digitisation

Considerable effort has been made to digitise the collections and make them publicly accessible. More than 1 million objects were entered into the databases of the institutions and will be accessible on the SwissNatColl platform. Half a million objects were photographed or scanned. This means that the objects might possibly be studied without necessarily being physically handled, thus enabling them to be better preserved. This is especially crucial for “types” specimens which are reference specimens for naming and describing a new species. In natural history collections, they are indeed among the most valuable specimens and are studied by researchers worldwide and therefore frequently handled. Within the context of the projects, 15’761 type specimens were databased and 14’070 photographed or scanned. In the future, all of these digitised objects might provide unique data for climate, biodiversity and landscape research as well as for environmental authorities and educational institutions. By the end of 2024, 28 scientific articles linked to the projects have been or were about to be published and at least 20 additional publications were planned.

Objects conditioning and revision

The focus of the projects laid also on conditioning of collections, following defined standards to prepare the specimens for digitisation. Thus, for 755’994 objects the storage conditions have been optimised according to state-of-the-art methodologies to ensure their long-term preservation and to prevent their loss. Finally, 644’221 objects have been reorganised in the collections and nearly 400’000 specimens have been revised according to the current taxonomy. Thus, none of the sections of the collections processed during the projects are anymore at risk and most of the specimens in these sections have been databased.

Training in institutions

A further goal was to promote training for collection management and taxonomic expertise. Within the projects, 207 persons, especially juniors (112 persons hired for the first time) have been trained in collection management and databasing, reaching from reconditioning the collections to taxonomic revisioning, databasing, scanning and photographing the specimens. The multiple collaborations resulted in important exchanges of knowledge between many institutions and many methodological approaches and workflows could be set up and be standardized, a valuable gain also for collection management and databasing work in the future.