This workshop was held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, on 2–4 May 2023.

Day 1: Tuesday, May 2 - Digitization coordination strategies in natural history institutions.

Day 2: Wednesday, May 3 - Project management and strategy, in addition to topics of coordination and leadership.

Day 3: Thursday, May 4 - Start-up tips for a digitization coordinator; future plans for creation of a Digitization Coordination Network.

Workshop participants included those working with established natural history collections with digitization programs and represented a range of experience with digitization coordination. Most participants were from institutions in the United States with some European institutions represented as well. See Table 1 for full list of participant names and their presentations, as well as Fig. 1 for a photograph of the group.

Figure 1.  

Photograph of the workshop participants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History taken by Mary Behlke - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Many larger museums and archives, such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian’s Libraries and Archives, The Natural History Museum London and the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin have begun to implement a centralized approach to collections digitization by creating Digitization Coordinator or Program Manager positions. This new effort has initiated a singular vision for digitization that incorporates priorities, workflows and resources to greatly improve the efficiency and throughput of digitization in collections; and to bring wider benefits such as clear advocacy for digitization, understanding of impact and improved career paths for digitization professionals.

Smaller institutions, such as the Natural History Museum of Utah, are now starting to see the benefit of creating a more structured cross-disciplinary approach to digitization, allowing for better awareness and resourcing of the digitization needs in the museum. After a popular symposium at BioDigiCon2022, it became evident that collections throughout the US are looking for ways to improve the efficiency, access and usability of their collections.

To expand on the interest in the topic, this 2023 Digitization Coordination workshop was designed to bring additional institutions together with the hope of creating best practice documents to guide institutions, faculty and staff in organizing a unified digitization approach and vision within their institution. Once together in person, it became evident that more was needed for this effort to be successful. Cultural changes within institutions and between institutions require leadership to help provide the community with holistic views of what has been accomplished to date and plans for future digitization efforts.

The aim of the workshop and its follow-up activities are to encourage the adoption of digitization coordination roles and practices; to increase the efficiency and resource sharing of digitization coordination across institutions; and to enable better communication and support between digitization coordination practitioners.

The workshop provided an opportunity to share different organizational perspectives and to discuss a range of practical topics, followed by a synthesis of these into a collection of informally and formally published resources.

Day 1 - Outline

Day 2 - Outline

Day 3 - Outline

As summarized above, we identified that the digitization coordination role and function is key across critical topics and work areas. The four priority topics identified and discussed on Day 2 that are likely to be a focus of future work for the group are:

1. Advocacy - In order to advocate effectively, we must find a way to connect our collections to the “common ground” to which people will relate. Advocacy should stay positive, but respond to the challenges of digitizing. Advocacy needs to respond to audiences - from local leadership to various types of funders, government and the public. Tools can include evidence of impact, cost effectiveness and economic benefit; strategic planning; a shared grand vision; and case studies of projects and their uses and impact;

2. Staffing - We recommend a single institution-wide digitization coordinator/program manager who is empowered and has senior stakeholder support. As discussed by many Day 1 presentations, this scenario creates the best potential for an effective digitization program. The digitization coordinator fosters innovation and discovery, communicates, advocates broadly across their organization as well as externally and implements an appropriate staffing and resourcing model. Where scale of team permits, digitization coordination also helps to professionalize career paths in digitization, linking these to wider leadership and project/program management skills and supporting staff development and retention.

3. Infrastructure - Digitization must be understood as including the full lifecycle of data mobilization, not just the creation of data and images on a local system. This requires integrated approaches including community data standards and systems that can interoperate - there are significant implications, for example, for collections management systems. Infrastructure can be challenging in many ways - particularly in relation to securing skilled resources. The ‘plumbing’ aspects of infrastructure can be hard to ‘sell’ as a story or funding prospect. On the other hand, the concept of collections data as a critical distributed research infrastructure nationally and globally to address key planetary challenges can be very powerful.

4. Prioritization – There are numerous factors that influence digitization prioritization - those mentioned throughout the course of the workshop include strategic factors (e.g. collections strengths and uniqueness, research relevance, cultural or engagement relevance, education relevance); audience and stakeholder factors (e.g. the needs of communities of origin, needs of key partners such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and other demand-led approaches); organizational factors (e.g. organizational strategy and goals, collections moves or particular collections risks); feasibility and practical factors (e.g. collections readiness, workflow readiness for object types, cost effectiveness); and cutting across all of these the key driver of funding and resources. In order to respond to these needs and opportunities, digitization coordinators must manage prioritization in a way that balances flexibility. For example, to respond to new funding opportunities or to events, such as the global pandemic, while adhering to a documented approach or principles, so that it remains strategic and efficient, rather than wholly reactive or ‘cherry picking’.

These topics cover some of the most challenging areas that a digitization coordinator must navigate within their institutions, often with limited resources. By creating shared resources and establishing a community, we can better support each other and share experiences and first-hand knowledge that would otherwise be hard to obtain. While digitization coordinators are likely to be the main audience of our future resources and publications, we recognize that we need to talk beyond our immediate community and there are relevant crossovers beyond natural history collections in libraries, archives and other repositories.

While we advocate for a dedicated digitization coordinator, we recognize that there are many ways digitization coordination can happen within institutions and across countries. There are likely to be different funding models, support within an institution and valuation of digitization as an institutional strategy.

Finally, our resources should be relevant to other museum roles that are directly involved with or support digitization, such as curators, collection staff, other scientific personnel, informatics and IT staff and directors. At a national and international level, our broader community needs to work with funding bodies, including national scientific research foundations/councils and demonstrate the impact of our digitization work to relevant policy-makers.

Throughout the workshop it became evident that more was needed beyond a general best practices' document. Coordination of digitization efforts within natural history collections is multifaceted with many different stakeholders. Collaborations between different collection-holding institutions, with broader geographic representation and collaboration with other community organizations would only strengthen the impact and sharing of knowledge. Participants agreed that a community network focused on information and resource sharing amongst people working in digitization coordinator roles or associated efforts was needed. The group set goals to create a “Digitization Coordinator Network” (DigiCoordNet) to help address these needs in the community. The DigiCoord network would utilize a space in GitHub for centralizing information and use Slack as a communication platform. Workshop activities will also be summarized into a series of publications and presentations, providing entry points, education and outreach to different stakeholder groups.

To view workshop presentations and details, go to the workshop Wiki page.

We would like to thank the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Office of the Associate Director of Science and Chief Scientist (ADCS) the Informatics and Data Science Center (IDSC) and iDigBio for supporting and hosting the workshop.

The NSF's Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI) program.

iDigBio: Sustaining the digitization, mobilization, accessibility, and use of biodiversity specimen data in U.S. museum and academic collections. iDigBio is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation [DBI-1115210 (2011-2018), DBI-1547229 (2016-2022) & DBI-2027654 (2021-2026)]. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This event was hosted by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.