Digital collections

The Natural History Museum of Denmark wants its collections to be as accessible as possible to both experts and ordinary citizens. We seek to realize this in the coming years through digitalization and more accessible web-based systems.

Specify

We are currently adopting Specify as the standard collections management system across all natural history collections in Denmark. The Natural History Museum of Denmark is providing the necessary infrastructure, setup, and support and, with financial support from the Danish Agency for Culture, has migrated data from legacy database systems during 2015 and 2016 in cooperation with Natural History Museum Aarhus, The Fisheries and Maritime Museum, Naturama, Østsjællands Museum, Museum Salling, Museum Mors and Museum Sønderjylland.

We are currently migrating our own collections to Specify. This is work in progress. Contact Nikolaj Scharff for general enquiries: nscharff@snm.ku.dk and Fedor Alexander Steeman for technical questions: fedor.steeman@snm.ku.dk

Ongoing digitalization

Digitization of selected zoological collections started a few years ago, funded by the Danish Agency for Culture.

Digitization of the botanical type collections were completed in 2015, co-funded by the American Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More than 21,500 species of flowering plants have now been registered, scanned and made available both nationally and internationally.

Thanks to a grant from the 15th of June Foundation, Danish botanist Martin Vahls (1749-1804) manuscript of 26,000 notecards containing an update of Linnaeus’Species Plantarum was digitised and made available for researchers and the general public in 2019.

The museums biocultural collection was digitised and databased in 2019 thanks to a grant from Apothecary Povl. M. Assens Foundation and is available through GBIF.

The collection of 30.000 Danish grasses has been digitised and will be publicly available through www.gbif.org in 2019 thanks to a private donation. Additional botanical digitisation projects are described in the subpages of the herbarium.

DanBIF and GBIF

DanBIF is part of the museum’s digital unit and makes Danish, Faroese and Greenlandic resources of biodiversity data internationally accessible. DanBIF stewards Danish participation in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which is the global network of biodiversity data. The Coordinating Secretariat of GBIF is hosted by The Natural History Museum of Denmark.

The core services of DanBIF are:

Making Danish, Faroese and Greenlandic biodiversity data accessible through GBIF
Collect and maintain an inventory of every species in Denmark: Allearter.dk
Help data contributors and -stewards treat and prepare data for publication in GBIF

Read more about DanBIF and GBIF or contact Isabel Calabuig: icalabuig@snm.ku.dk