Towards a Roadmap for Advancing the Catalogue of the World’s Natural History Collections

Abstract

Natural history collections are the foundations upon which all knowledge of natural history is constructed. Biological specimens are the best documentation of variation within each species, increasingly serve as curated sources for reference DNA, and are frequently our only evidence for historical species distribution. Collections represent an enormous multigenerational investment in research infrastructure for the biological sciences, but despite this importance most of the holdings of these institutions remain invisible on the Internet, inaccessible to taxonomists from other countries and hidden from computational biodiversity research. Although comprehensive digitisation of the complete holdings of each natural history collection is the long-term goal, this is an expensive and labor-intensive task and will not be completed in the near future for all collections. However, many benefits could quickly be achieved by publishing high-quality metadata on each collection to increase its visibility, provide the foundations for further digitisation and enable researchers to discover and communicate with collections of interest. This paper summarises the results from a consultation activity carried out in 2020 as part of the SYNTHESYS+ (Synthesys of Systematic Resources), “Developing implementation roadmaps for priority infrastructure areas as part of cooperative RI for biodiversity” project. This consultation was primed through an ideas paper, and introductory webinars and conducted as a facilitated two-week online multilingual discussion around 26 topics grouped under four broad headings (Users, Content, Technology and Governance). The results of these discussions are summarised here, along with the wider context of existing and planned initiatives.