Inside these drawers is The Virginia Tech Insect Collection, the oldest and largest entomological collection in Virginia, founded in 1888. More than 20 stark white cabinets filled top to bottom with glass-topped Cornell pine drawers line the climate-controlled and monitored room.

The smaller objects in particular will be digitized.In the unassuming basement of Virginia Tech’s Seitz Hall, 130-year-old history of Virginia’s insect biodiversity is carefully preserved and documented. In the future, more than 7,500 objects per day are to be digitised using assembly line technology.Currently, an average of 500 objects are digitized every day.Over 500 guests ranging from researchers to artists.The oldest objects are 4,000 year old beetles from a sarcophagus.The collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin comprises 30 million objects, of which 15 million are insects the collection of hymenoptera such as ants, bees and wasps comprises 2.3 million objects.The Digitization Street is located directly next to the Sauriersaal. The digitization team is available for talks from Tuesday to Sunday between 11 am and 4 pm. Why is it so important to capture insects digitally in times of insect mortality? Why are natural history collections important for research? “Berlin's medical research, art and start-up scene work with the collection and draw inspiration from it.”Įxperience digitization live in the exhibitionĭuring live digitization, visitors can take a look at the fascinating 3D images and ask experts their questions. “We open our collections to everyone to make knowledge about nature accessible and to create space for innovation,” says Frederik Berger, scientific director of collection digitization. People all over the world benefit from freely accessible, digital and encyclopedic collections. About ten percent of 30 million objects have already been digitized. Zooming in, turning around, looking from above or below: None of this is a problem. The aim is for people worldwide to be able to search, view and examine all objects by means of a database. In addition to the animals, the tiny handwritten labels and QR codes are also recorded. These include the type specimens: these are the individuals that were used to describe the species for the first time. Only the particularly valuable objects among the insects will be recorded with the DISC3D. In the end, each object requires a few gigabytes of storage space.īy 2030, all 30 million objects in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin will be digitally recorded using various methods. The scanner needs several hours to do this. Images are taken from nearly 400 perspectives with a 12-megapixel sensor. The insects in 3D are assembled from around 25,000 photographs. “We are happy to provide the building instructions and look forward to further supporters,” say Schmelzle and Heethoff. The association advises natural history museums worldwide on the digital recording of their collections.

(Digital Natural History Archive Darmstadt). “The system we developed is unique and we are very pleased that it is now being used in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.įor the further open source development of the device, the developers Ströbel, Heethoff, Schmelzle and Blüthgen, together with colleagues from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, have founded the charitable association DiNArDa e.V., which is responsible for the development of the device. “The insect scanner is just as suitable for flies a few millimeters in size as for beetles several centimeters in size,” says Michael Heethoff, one of the developers at Darmstadt Technical University. But the 3D objects also serve current research questions and can give researchers from all over the world important clues for their questions. Insects hundreds of years old can thus be digitally preserved for posterity. Safeguarding valuable natural history collections for posterityĮven the smallest insects are digitally imaged using the fully automatic Darmstadt insect scanner which creates high-resolution, three-dimensional objects. Because many answers lie in the natural history collections of this world.” We need more such cooperation and open source projects in order to find solutions to the questions of the future. “We become an open research museum and at the same time less CO2 is released into the air.

Insect scannerz