[Nhcoll-l] This week’s iDigBio Webinar

[Nelson,Gil]

iDigBio is pleased to announce this week’s edition of our Sustaining Collections Digitization Beyond NSF Funding webinar series, featuring colleagues from the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University. MCZ has been a leader in collections digitization since before the beginning of NSF’s Advancing the Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program in 2011 and was one of the first museums visited by iDioBio staff as we surveyed digitization practices across the U.S. You  won’t want to miss this event happening this Thursday, 9 April at 2:00 p.m. Eastern.
Register here:
https://www.idigbio.org/content/webinar-series-importance-sustaining-biodiversity-specimen-collections-digitization-absence
 For past recordings and upcoming events, visit the series Wiki page:
https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Sustaining_Collections_Digitization_Beyond_NSF_Funding:_A_Webinar_Series
<https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Sustaining_Collections_Digitization_Beyond_NSF_Funding:_A_Webinar_Series>
April 9, 2026: Planning for the future of Biodiversity Digitization and Data Mobilization at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (2:00-3:00pm ET)
Speakers:
Breda Zimkus (Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology)
Jon Woodward (Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology)
Richard A. Rabideau Childers (Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology)
Wei-Ping Chan (Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology)
Abstract: The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University houses approximately 21 million animal specimens across ten departments, each with its own discipline-specific practices and priorities. As a result, collection digitization at the museum over the last 40 years has proceeded in a decentralized and often piecemeal fashion. In this talk, we will provide a history of digitization at the MCZ and examine both some of the successes and challenges of the past, using them as a lens through which to survey the foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future. We highlight how institutional priorities and community support have contributed to important advances in centralization and standardization and have kept digitization moving forward. We will focus particularly on a new high-throughput digitization system that we are developing, incorporating recent advances in 3D imaging and machine learning to dramatically improve the speed of specimen imaging and cataloging in collections for which conventional digitization is simply too extensive of a task.
Best,
Gil



Gil Nelson PhD, Director

Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio)

Immediate Past President, Natural Science Collections Alliance (NSCA)

Florida Museum of Natural History

University of Florida

gnelson at floridamuseum.ufl.edu<mailto:gnelson at floridamuseum.ufl.edu>

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