Digital specimen images
at the Herbarium Berolinense (B)

After a prolonged period of testing, the BGBM has started to offer to high resolution images of its herbarium holdings.

Several problems had to be solved. To streamline the process of digitisation, images should be taken of entire herbarium sheets. In addition, we required an image resolution sufficiently high to show details of the plants and label texts (roughly equivalent to viewing the original sheet with the naked eye). Cameras providing this kind of resolution at reasonable cost have only recently become available. The other problem which needed to be solved was how to make high resolution images available over the network - even if compressed our files are several Megabytes in size. The solution is to use a picture format like FlashPix, which integrates several resolutions so that users can zoom-in on details. The MGI Image Server software is able to provide that functionality over the World Wide Web. Only the amount of data necessary for the specific display is transferred over the network.

We are planning several projects to digitise specific parts of the collection. In parallel, loans are to be replaced as far as possible by the provision of images for on-line viewing or download. Sending plant material by mail is expensive, often slow and unreliable, and may result in damage or sometimes loss. To reduce such risks as well as cost, and to speed up the process, we are as a rule no longer sending specimens on loan, but are instead preparing images of the requested material, where possible. We offer these images on our zoom server, but to serve loan requests compressed images can also be provided for download. If this poses difficulties we can examine other solutions, at your convenience, such as sending the files by email (if you can receive large files - between 500KB and 2MB each), or - as a last resort - sending you electronic copies or paper printouts by mail.

Please note that, in any case, the copyright for the images stays with us. The images may not passed on to any third party without our written consent and due mention of the copyright restrictions, and may not be used for commercial or non-scientific purposes. Reproduction in scientific publications is authorised on the condition that the source and the copyright are fully acknowledged:
© Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem.

Currently, only basic information is captured in textual form; i.e. the barcode, the scientific name under which the specimen is stored, the modern country of origin (where it can be easily deduced), and the original designation of the collection site. We are working on a procedure to allow remote annotation of the images.