On the 15th of October, the Natural History Museum of Vienna will host a crowdsourcing event organised by the European TETTRIs (Transforming European Taxonomy thorough Training, Research and Innovation) project.
The aim of the event is to explain the need for and use of collections in science and conservation, and the importance of making them accessible to a wider public through an extensive digitisation process. One way this can be achieved is through the precious help of citizen scientists, amateur experts or science enthusiasts who can contribute in the digitisation of thousands of specimens together with the related information, for example by transcribing label data or supplementary material such as travel diaries or the correspondence of a collector, that often contains information of great importance but requires some degree of expertise to be correctly interpreted (among other issues: difficult handwriting, obsolete location names…).
The event is addressed to aspiring citizen scientists and anyone who is interested in taking a closer look into the world of scientific collections.
From 10:00 to 12:00 in the Deck50 of the NHMW a series of presentations on existing crowdsourcing platforms will take place, followed from 13:00 on by digitisation workshop in the same location.