The entomological collections (insect collections) at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin comprise over 15 million individual specimens. The declared objective of the Museum is to make those collections accessible not only for scientists, but also for the public at large – ideally not just at the Museum, but from anywhere in the world.
The project "Erschließung objektreicher Spezialsammlungen" (Establishing an inventory of species-rich collections, EoS) was a major step in that direction. The project involved digitising our entomological collection, i.e. to inventorise them in a database, including digital images of the insect cases as well as important individual specimens.
EoS comprised three subproject:
- Large-scale digitisation of insect cases and individual specimens
- 3 D visualisation of small specimens
- Long-term archive storage of large data generated as par of the project.
The portal for the insect drawers was switched off for technical reasons after the project ended, but in 2022 the insect drawers were fed into the museum's new data portal and can be found at https://portal.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/collection/insect-drawers among many other great digitisations.
Core Data
Duration of the project:
01/02/2012 to 30/09/2015
Project partners:
- Berliner Museumsportal, Partner der EFRE-Pilotprojekte
- Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum der FU Berlin
- University of Kansas, USA
- Natural History Museum Stockholm, Sweden
- Naturalis Biodiversity Center Leiden, Niederlande
- Natural History Museum London, UK
- Atlas of Living Australia, Canberra, Australia
- SmartDrive Huntingdon, UK
- Konrad Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB)
- Goportis Leibniz Library Network for Research Information
- Nestor competence network for digital preservation
Project funding:
Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Technologie und Forschung (Berlin)
Project number:
Inno 02-2013000365
Final report: (in German only)