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Specimens held in private natural history collections form an essential, but often neglected part of the specimens held worldwide in natural history collections. When engaging in regional, national or international initiatives aimed at increasing the accessibility of biodiversity data, it is paramount to include private collections as much and as often as possible. Compared to larger collections in national history institutions, private collections present a unique set of challenges: they are numerous, anonymous, small and diverse in all aspects of collection management. In ICEDIG, a design study for DiSSCo these challenges were tackled in task 2 "Inventory of content and incentives for digitisation of small and private collections" under Workpackage 2 "Inventory of current criteria for prioritization of digitization". First, we need to understand the current state and content of private collections within Europe, to identify and tackle challenges more effectively. While some private collections will duplicate material already held in public collections, many are likely to fill more specialised or unusual niches, relevant to the particular collector(s). At present, there is little evidence about the content of private collections and this needs to be explored. In 2018, a European survey was carried out amongst private collection owners to gain more insight in the volume, scope and degree of digitisation of these collections. Based on this survey, all of the respondents’ collections combined are estimated to contain between 9 and 33 million specimens. This is only the tip of the iceberg for private collections in Europe and underlines the importance of these private collections. Digitisation and sharing collection data are activities that are overall considered important among private collection owners. The survey also showed that for those who have not yet started digitising their collection, the provision of tools and information would be most valuable. These and other highlights of the survey will be presented. In addition, protocols for inventories of private collections will be discussed, as well as ways to keep these up to date. To enhance the inclusion of private collections in Europe’s digitisation efforts, we recognise that we mainly have to focus on the challenges regarding the ‘how’ (work-process), and the sharing of information residing in private collections (including ownership, legal issues, sensitive data). Where necessary, we will also draw attention to the ‘why’ (motivation) of digitisation. A communication strategy aimed at raising awareness about digitisation, offering insight in the practicalities to implement digitisation as well as providing answers to issues related to sharing information, is an essential tool. Elements of a communication strategy to further engage private collection owners will be presented, as will conclusions and recommendations. Finally, digitisation and communication aspects related to private collection owners will need to be tested within the community. Therefore, a pilot project is currently (2018-2019) being carried out in Estonia, Finland and the Netherlands to digitise private collections in a variety of settings. Preliminary results will be presented, zooming in on different approaches to include data from private collections in the overall (research) infrastructures.

Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) a pan-European Research Infrastructure will facilitate the production of tens of millions of digital images of natural history specimens each year. The labels of these specimens contain valuable information for research, but their transcription can be difficult and time-consuming, with often hard to read handwritten labels. Whilst accurate label transcription is only one step along the way to create a specimen record fit for different research uses, it is an extremely important one. It would be very time-consuming to have to return to recheck label information for even a very small proportion of specimens. Once a specimen label is transcribed correctly, it becomes much easier to enhance the record with additional information from other sources, e.g. from literature or collector itineraries. It also becomes feasible to determine the point of collection from the textual information on the label by a process known as georeferencing, or even to find inaccuracies within the label itself. Under the auspices of the project Innovation and Consolidation for Large Scale Digitisation of Natural Heritage (ICEDIG), we compared different manual approaches to transcription of collection labels. Using herbarium specimens as an example, the quality of transcribed data by: in-house trained institute staff, outsourcing to a commercial company or transcription by the general public through online crowdsourcing platforms was compared through two transcription pilots. in-house trained institute staff, outsourcing to a commercial company or transcription by the general public through online crowdsourcing platforms was compared through two transcription pilots. The first pilot consisted of 200 Solanum specimen images from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the UK and 200 from Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium. This particular genus was chosen as both institutes had specimens from which the label data had already been transcribed through the digitisation company Picturae, completed by Alembo. The Kew specimens had also been transcribed in-house by staff employed as digitisation officers or curators and by an independant researcher. The images from both institutes were uploaded to two crowdsourcing platforms: DigiVol and DoeDat. In a second pilot, multiple European institutions holding botanical collections were approached to provide a sample of 200 digitally imaged herbarium sheet specimens to upload to multiple crowdsourcing platforms. Specimens from 7 institutions were uploaded for transcription to 5 different crowdsourcing platforms: DigiVol, DoeDat, Die Herbonauten, Les Herbonautes and Notes from Nature. For both pilots, key transcription data were assessed and common errors in label transcription identified. Reasons for these errors will be discussed along with possible mechanisms to improve the accuracy of the transcriptions. The need for standards for transcription is identified and recommendations made.

The Herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden is in the top 15 herbaria worldwide. The collection comprises some four million specimens, which are important for scientific research. Digitisation of specimens includes imaging, transcription of label information, linking data and making the results publicly accessible online. In addition to facilitating researchers’ access to specimens, digitisation also brings new possibilities for analysis and discovery of new data, such as the vast amount of information on handwritten labels. In the DOE! project (Digitale Ontsluiting Erfgoedcollecties), funded by the Flemish Government, 1.2 million herbarium sheets from the African and Belgian collections were digitised. We have received additional funding to digitise a further 1.4 million specimens for the remaining vascular plants and macro-algae collections, by October 2021. These include the historic collections of Von Martius and Van Heurck. Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868) was a pioneering explorer whose expeditions led to the discovery of many species. He amassed over 300,000 specimens, some of which were used to compile the first Flora of Brazil. Henri Van Heurck (1838–1909) also gathered herbarium specimens from all over the world, including a specimen originally from the collection of Linnaeus. Despite this being our second mass digitisation project, there are significant differences in our approach. This is partly due to lessons learned from the first project and partly to the nature of the collections themselves. The differences in the tendering process, specimen preparation, workflow and data capture will be explained. Making these specimens openly available online through www.botanicalcollections.be is valuable to scientific research as well as valorising of our collections. Currently, the site attracts 7000 users a year, which adds up to 15,000 sessions a year and the average session is more than 8 minutes. This means that people are actively using our website and these numbers can be expected to grow as we add more specimens and functionality.