Beyond Transcription: Realising the Research Potential of Museum Specimens Through Citizen Science

Technological advances are making a new generation of natural history museum—the digital museum—increasingly possible. Digital technology offers the exciting prospect of making the information contained within the... [ view full abstract ]

Technological advances are making a new generation of natural history museum—the digital museum—increasingly possible. Digital technology offers the exciting prospect of making the information contained within the world’s vast natural history collections freely available online, to a truly global audience. This has the promise to revolutionise how museum collections—and the long time-series biodiversity archive that they contain - can be used to generate new understanding of the natural world and address some of the key questions facing the future of biodiversity, including the impacts of environmental change.

To support this enormous endeavour, museums are increasingly utilising a citizen science approach to help digitize specimen information, for example by asking volunteers to help transcribe collecting data from specimen labels and registers. This typically takes the form of online crowdsourcing via a web platform, with the organisation concerned choosing and uploading the dataset to be worked on. A growing number of innovative transcription-based projects are available and whilst knowledge gaps remain, the benefits of this form of citizen science to the organisations and citizen scientists involved are increasingly understood.

But can museums move beyond employing such citizen science approaches primarily as means to support the digitisation of specimens for future research use, to models through which participating volunteers are able to directly contribute to this research activity? Could this provide a richer experience for scientists and volunteer participants alike?

In this presentation we explore potential future directions for natural history specimen-based citizen science. We illustrate the talk with examples from the UK, including a new co-created project through which museum scientists and volunteers, amateur naturalists and the online community are working together to investigate the impact of climate change on the UK’s charismatic and botanically important orchid populations.