Once upon a time museums saw databasing of their collection holdings as the holy grail of collection management and data access. This has now been superseded by the digitising of collections where specimens are imaged and their associated label data entered as complementary data. Digitising is the new databasing. The advent of this approach has come from the realisation that having an image of the specimen and its associated labels has strong collection data management benefits including:

1. An readily accessible digital voucher of specimen and labels for verifying data
2. A reduced need for specimen handling
3. A virtual specimen in the event of collection loss or damage (eg fire, flood, earthquake), or when the specimen is on loan
4. Remote access to original label data for review by researchers
5. Capacity for using handwriting to help identify collector in absence of collector name
6. Some limited potential for species identification from an image
7. Enabling the use of “non-experts” in data entry with the benefit of knowing data quality and dubious data can be checked without having to physically visit the specimen in the collection.

This is all great, but the problem still remains that resourcing large-scale digitising is still beyond the budgets of most museums. Generally, funding bodies, governments included, see digitising as a core activity and so are unwilling to fund the staff required to make it happen at the scale that is required to have an impact on the large undigitised collections held by many museums. Compared to many countries, Australia is doing relatively well in the proportion of its collections that are digitised, yet entomology collections in Australia are largely undigitised eg Australian Museum  11.4%, Queensland Museum 9.4%, Museum Victoria 9.4%, Australian National Insect Collection 4.2% (statistics courtesy Atlas of Living Australia).

The Australian Museum, with funding assistance provided by the Atlas of Living Australia, has developed an approach to digitising that combines the benefits of image-based digitisation with the required throughput necessary to seriously address the huge task in a meaningful time. We have done this by developing a program that uses a digitising coordinator to leverage a team of some 50 volunteers so that we have 4 digitising workstations operating 4 days a week and we estimate that we will digitise 100,000 specimens per year.