In the curation of the Frost, we often contemplate the myriad ways to make the collection more accessible and secure. This involves digitization projects as well as a wide range of infrastructure improvements, which is a common theme on this blog.
This week we began a new pollinators digitization project, starting with the museum’s collection of Bombus specimens. If you’ve been following our Instagram (which I suggest you should), you will have already seen snippets of this project. This week has mainly involved developing templates and establishing a workflow for imaging.
Handling pinned specimens tends to cause the images to take longer in general as more of a slow, gentle touch is required than that for that of Odonata imaging. In the coming weeks, we will hopefully fine tune the SOP for pinned pollinator imaging. This process of imaging requires that all labels be removed from the pin followed by each specimen receiving an identifier label and species label before being repinned and placed back in the appropriate drawer.
An additional level of complexity stems from the fact that we are imaging the Bombus specimens laterally. Lateral images exhibit more identifying characters than that of dorsal images. In the latter, the wings often obscure the body, causing it to be more difficult to see the color patterns to determine species. However, lateral imaging can also make it harder to maintain all necessary elements of the image in the same plane as well as keep the specimen level. Bombus can be rather heavy, so gravity tends to pull the larger specimens’ abdomens downward. Stay tuned for more updates on this digitization project!
Stay tuned for more from the Frost!
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