In the world of museums, collections departments serve as treasure troves of historical objects, art pieces, cultural artifacts, and scientific specimens. Despite the digital age we live in, a significant portion of museum records are still stored in physical catalogues or accession registers. These analog databases are vital as they provide important information about the origins and materials of the items in the collection.
One of the challenges with traditional analog record-keeping is the limited access to the information. Only those deeply familiar with a specific collection may know about all the items it contains. Finding a particular item often requires old-fashioned detective work. However, museums are now increasingly working towards making their collections more accessible to researchers and the general public through online resources.
At the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, for example, intricate handwritten labels accompany tiny invertebrates preserved in the collection. These labels serve as a reminder of a time before digital archiving became prevalent. The museum’s new exhibition, “Making the Invisible Visible: Digitizing Invertebrates on Microscope Slides,” showcases Harvard’s diverse collection of over 50,000 specimens, some of which are over a century old. One slide even features a soft coral specimen inscribed with a note from Charles Darwin to James Dwight Dana.
The exhibition is an extension of a project launched in 2024 to digitize more than 3,000 specimens from the collection. This process involves locating, restoring, rehousing, and capturing high-resolution images of the items so they can be shared online with researchers worldwide. Even the addition of QR code labels to the 19th-century objects serves as an intriguing blend of historical and modern archiving techniques, raising questions about how these specimens will be utilized in the future.
“Museums are increasingly working towards making their collections more accessible to researchers and the public”
The “Making the Invisible Visible” exhibition is currently on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers a glimpse into the meticulous work of digitizing and preserving historical specimens for future generations to study and appreciate. Through innovative projects like this, museums are bridging the gap between the past and the present, ensuring that valuable collections remain relevant and accessible in the digital age.
