Mass Digitization of Individual Pinned Insects Using Conveyor-Driven Imaging

Natural history museums of the world house hundreds of millions of insect specimens. Digitization of individual, pinned specimens is a challenging task, especially if the pinned data labels are expected to be imaged as well. Two automatic digitization lines for imaging of small objects were designed and built by the Digitarium team. Lines were used to test digitization efficiency of several subgroups of pinned insects: butterflies, beetles, flies and bees. Results showed that speed of digitization varied between 41-125 specimens an hour, depending on the number of operators, pre-treatments needed, and the number of cameras used. The amount of transcription work during the process also affected the pace of work by the operators. After testing it was calculated that basic in-house costs of automatized digitization of a specimen were around 0.40 - 0.60 €, while commercial prices varied between 1.20 - 1.40 €.