Remember back to our first lockdown?, many of our volunteers decided to help online with the Australian Museum’s digitisation program, DigiVol.
As a DigiVol Online volunteer you make vital contributions of transcribing text from images of specimen labels, field notes and archival material. It was a perfect task during lockdown!
This year DigiVol is celebrating 10 Years!. Have a read of the article below to learn more:
In 2011, the collection manager of Entomology removed a drawer full of Cicada’s from a vast room of insects hidden away in a room below the public space at the AM. The drawer was handed to a team of volunteers filled with nervous energy; this was their first opportunity to put their skills to the test and get a sneak peek into collections not accessible to the public. The task was to delicately remove each specimen from the draw, along with its label which contains important data about the specimen, and to take a photograph.
This was the beginning of the successful collaboration between the Australian Museum and the Atlas of Living Australia, the first specimens to be digitized by the AM, and the birth of the crowdsourcing citizen science project known as DigiVol.
Museum collections could be compared to an iceberg, the portion above the water’s surface is what is visible to the public, however below the surface there are volumes of material that often goes unseen. Digitisation makes the often unseen visible to a global audience, it protects collections from future loss and makes data more readily available to research.
Since its humble beginnings in 2011 DigiVol lab volunteers have contributed 60,000 hours to create 682,000 digital records. The DigiVol online community have completed more than 8 million transcriptions, and contributed more than 140,000 Hours in the past 2 years. 10 years on and you could say that DigiVol is synonymous with digitization – much like the piercing chirp of the cicada is to the Australian summer.
Learn more about DigiVol on the Australian Museum website
Watch out for future volunteer opportunities at the Powerhouse helping digitise Wikipedia.
Karen Griffiths
Volunteer Program Officer