Roderic Page edited As_with_many_fields_digitisation__.md  over 8 years ago

Commit id: 1e7a1c586f895652d5b81e22c5613ac1b9f438c6

deletions | additions      

       

As with many fields, digitisation is having huge impact on the study of biodiversity. Many different museums and herbaria are engaged with turning physical, analogue specimens into digital objects, whether these are strings of A's, G's, C's and T's from DNA sequencing machines, or the bits obtained from a digital camera. Libraries and commercial publishers are converting physical books and articles into images, which are then converted into strings of letters, subject to the limitations of optical character recognition (OCR). Indeed, there are striking parallels between the formation of DNA sequence databases in the twentieth century and natural history museums in the nineteenth \cite{Strasser_2011} \cite{Strasser_2008}. Viewed in this way, both classical taxonomy and genomics are now in the business of digitising life.  But this need not imply that different digitisation efforts are proceeding at the same pace, or that these digitisation efforts are integrated or coordinated. This paper explores some of these issues.