News from the DaSSCo mass digitisation programme - October to December 2025

Image: Digitisation at NHMD

Team news

No news on the team status. Thank you all for the great work throughout the year!

Digitisation news

Let’s start with an overview of the digitisation for just Q4. At the Natural History Museum Denmark (NHMD), a total of 29,700 specimens were digitised across Entomology and Herbarium collections. In Aarhus the Entomology and Herbarium units digitised 11,752 specimens all together. This adds up to more than 41,000 in total. If we are looking at the full year of 2025, a total of 163,000 specimens across all institutions were digitised. Well done everybody.

In October 2025, DaSSCo reached the halfway point in the digitisation of the Danish Herbarium at NHMD. The Danish Herbarium contains plants collected in Denmark, while specimens collected elsewhere are in the General Herbarium. The halfway point was reached at box 1626 out of a total of 3252 boxes. At that time 68,895 specimens from 77 different plant families had been digitised. The milestone was marked with a small celebration held together with two other anniversaries.

Image: From the DaSSCo celebration (with other staff)

During the quarter, the pinned insect digitisation workstations at NHMD were moved to a new and larger room. This provides improved working conditions, more space for digitisation activities, and a better room climate compared to the previous location, which tended to overheat during summer.

In November 2025, DaSSCo completed the digitisation of the Danish Orchid collection at NHMD. All orchids have been protected in Denmark since 1991, and most specimens collected after that year are therefore represented by photographs rather than preserved plant material. The NHMD Herbarium holds nearly 5,000 Danish orchid specimens in total.

Image:

Cephalanthera longifolia, collected in Denmark in 1925

Development news

In Q4 the Specify team continued working on keeping Specify running smoothly for its users. This included hosting workshops and user guides for new features, such as Batch Edit, as well as the addition of loan forms in Specify7 across all collections. The new replication server is now fully up and running, which relieves the live server when validating new imported datasets, so the system does not temporarily freeze. We also continued contributing to the Specify Consortium through committee work, including chairing the Technical Advisory Committee and participating in the User Advisory Committee.

DaSSCo IT also worked on integrating ARS with Specify, and test versions now support workflows from digitisation to publication in Specify. At the same time, the internal ARS user interface developed by our external supplier NorthTech, was close to completion by the end of the quarter.

We also prepared for the expiration of UCloud resources in early 2026, which had previously hosted servers used for transcription, integrations, and image processing via a SLURM cluster. DaSSCo was allocated resources on the LUMI cluster, and all servers, except the SLURM component, were migrated to DaSSCo-managed infrastructure. A potential future move to Azure is under consideration.

Development also continued on adapting the transcription platform to work with the Danish Specify 7 installations. This work is expected to continue into Q1 2026. In the transcription platform it is possible for a project owner to define a transcription project consisting of a set of fields or questions for the user to transcribe. The project owner also defines where validated fields should be mapped in Specify. During the execution of the transcription project several users will transcribe each specimen and once consensus is reached (based on a point scoring system) a transcription becomes validated and is automatically transferred into Specify.

Other news

In October 2025 the DaSSCo team at the Natural History Museum Denmark physically relocated from the former Zoological Museum building to the Botanical Museum in the Botanical Garden. Though also having digitisation elsewhere in Copenhagen.