Computerising natural history card archives

This paper summarises the achievements of a multidisciplinary Bioinformatics project which has the objective of providing a general mechanism for efficient computerisation of typewritten/hand-annotated archive card indexes, of the type found in most museums, archives and libraries. In addition to efficiently scanning, recognising and databasing the content of the cards, the original card images must be maintained as the ultimate source record, and a flexible database structure is required to allow taxonomists to reorganise and update the resulting online archive. Implementation mechanisms for each part of the overall system are described, and conversion performance for a demonstrator database of 27,578 Pyralid moth archive cards is reported. The system is currently being used to convert the full NHM archive of Lepidoptera totalling 290,886 cards.