Hello,
I am volunteering some time this summer to do some maintenance and organization of a small university’s specimen collection, primarily marine invertebrates and fishes. My ambition and hopes certainly outnumber the time and experience I have in this area, so any tips and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
My main two questions:
Any recommendations for free (or low-cost platforms) for digitizing the records for the collection? From what I gather looking through past forum posts and my understanding of iNat it wouldn’t be appropriate to set up a page for the collection here but I’m sure there are people on here who know where would be a good place.
Is there an acceptable way to use the iNaturalist platform to get some support in confirmatory identifications for select specimens?
If you know the general identity of a specimen, you could reach out to one of the top identifiers for assistance. In the past, I posted a few museum insects on iNat of rare species so they can have a cover photo.
Any spreadsheet or database system (including free ones) will do, when it comes to digitization of small natural history collections - of both existing records, and specimens (photos scans etc.).
You – or let’s say, your institution – choose where you host it: a folder in a dusty computer in a room (with backups…), and/or someone else’s computers (“cloud”…).
Then you can eventually publish that info through your own channels (physical media, internet-facing institutional servers…) and/or sharing the duty with third parties (GBIF…)
If you ever use forums/inaturalist/facebook/whatever to gain extra information about a specimen, make sure you document things properly (“Specimen: X24548-N | Identification: ‘Ondatra zibethicus’ | Identifier: geraldlover42 on twitter 18Jul2025, http:/blah>”)
would be against iNat’s guidance that it shouldn’t be used for museum collections.
If someone collected the specimens themselves, they can post them with time/date of their collection (though this still shouldn’t be done wholesale for museum collections).
Ideally you would want to find a Symbiota portal to join. However, I’m not sure there are any devoted to marine invertebrates and fishes. There are many other Collection Management Systems available (Arctos, EMu, Specify, Terentia), but they are generally quite expensive. Symbiota is the only free option. If you can’t find a Symbiota portal to join and the university doesn’t have any other CMS options available, you may have to resort to using something like Access or Excel or Google Sheets.
As far as using iNaturalist for identification of museum specimens, this is frowned upon, but tolerated in small amounts. Generally, we don’t want museums dumping hundreds or thousands of specimen records in iNaturalist, but using iNat to get identifications for a small number of interesting specimens (if they have proper metadata) is probably OK, especially if they are taxa not well represented on iNaturalist. Another option is to reach out to people on iNat who do a lot of identification of marine invertebrates and fishes and see if they would be willing to help outside of iNaturalist. Good luck!
In general, check out the resources provided by iDigBio (the U.S. hub for digitizing natural history collections) and SPNHC (the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections).
Depending on the scale of what you’re trying to do, Symbiota may be a good choice, and Specify and Arctos are two other platforms that many university collections use.
However, if the main task you want to do at this stage is capture structured data from labels, or capture images of labels so that others can help transcribe them, a whole collections management platform may be more than you need. It’s fine to start small with data in a spreadsheet, and go up from there when you’re ready. If that’s the stage you’re at, my suggestion would be to focus on the tools that make data capture and transcription easy (is it quicker to use voice to text software than to type? would mounting an iPad on a camera stand help you move quickly from specimen to specimen?). Once you have data in a spreadsheet, reformatting them, parsing them, and moving them between platforms is often reasonably straightforward. If what you’re dealing with is wet (fluid-preserved) collections, handling the specimens and getting a clear view of the labels may be trickier than handling the resulting data.
For marine invertebrates, also take a look at the DigIn (Digitizing Marine Invertebrates) network, which is an ongoing NSF-funded effort to digitize marine invert specimens at a bunch of U.S. museums. Someone’s protocol from that network might help you get started, and if there’s a DigIn institution close to you they might be willing to let you visit and show you what they’re doing.
For fishes, there’s FishNet and VertNet (which brings together records for all vertebrate groups). I don’t know how actively updated either of them is anymore, as some of the services they provided have been taken over by iDigBio and GBIF, but they probably still have some advice and online resources for small collections.
My only advice is based on museum collections I’ve seen uploaded previously.
A lot of the museum collections I see uploaded (on here and on some of the lichen ID reference sites I use) are purely focusing on the information on the slip, and they don’t even bother making sure the specimen itself is in focus or identifiable. It’s like they want us to agree or disagree with uploads of a slip of paper with a species name and a specimen number on it and a slight grey blur at the bottom of the page where the specimen was. It’s beyond something where you can narrow it down to 2 species but the final detail is obscured, many are so unverifiable I wouldn’t even be able to tell you what family the specimen was in.
If you’re uploading old museum specimen please upload more than one photo so it isn’t just spamming the needs ID section with unverifiable photos of insanely rare species. I can message you links to the types of unverifiable uploads I’m talking about if you like but I think it would be against forum rules to link it here.
This type of upload honestly bugs me significantly more than beginner naturalists not showing all the necessary features because herbarium employees should in theory have a better idea than a random person about which features need to be shown.
For digitization, I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been suggested. I would use Symbiota, since it is free, and it sounds like you might not have institution support for paying for a data management platform.
One thing I will add about adding specimen photos to iNaturalist: if you collected the specimen, feel free to upload it to your personal account. If you did not, it is probably best to create a separate account for the collection and upload it there. Best practice for specimens on iNat, as I understand it, is to limit uploading observations of them to interesting records that would significantly improve iNaturalist. Prioritize taking useful photos of the specimen that show key identification features (IMO, data from the tag is not really necessary to show in the photos – just use it to add date, locality, etc.). I would not bother uploading any that do not have useful data. For things that you aren’t sure about for the identification, I agree that reaching out to users privately is probably better than uploading many observations of specimens.