Digitizing Biological Collections in Canada

This Notes from Nature project opens Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's cabinets to careful online typists. Each workflow asks volunteers to inspect photographed plants or insects and move the useful details on their labels into structured digital records.

What is Digitizing Biological Collections in Canada?

A biological collection can hold millions of physical answers and still behave like a library without a catalogue. Here, the bottleneck is often a card or label: collector, date, place, species name, and collection number are visible to a person but not yet usable as data. Digitizing Biological Collections in Canada breaks that backlog into bounded transcription expeditions. The subject matter shifts as new batches arrive; the visible statistics page currently lists insect-focused workflows and a three-review retirement limit. Notes from Nature's published method uses repeated independent entries and reconciliation, so one volunteer is not asked to turn every smudge into gospel. The satisfying part is modest but real: a few faithfully copied fields can help a specimen leave its drawer-shaped data island and become findable for later biodiversity, agricultural, and historical work.

What you can do there

• Inspect digitized biological specimens and their labels
• Transcribe collection data into structured fields
• Join changing plant and insect collection workflows

Why we picked it

This is productive museum-shelf archaeology without the white gloves. Old typewriter ink, handwriting, pinned insects, and pressed plants become a practical reading puzzle, and the payoff is durable data rather than a leaderboard-shaped puff of smoke.

How to get the most from it

Choose an active expedition, read its field-specific instructions, and inspect the whole label before entering anything. Preserve what is visibly written instead of correcting or guessing beyond the workflow's rules, and use the project's discussion channel when an abbreviation, place name, or handwriting knot refuses to untangle.

Good to know

The work is image- and text-heavy, and some labels will be genuinely difficult. Expeditions and requested fields change with each collection batch. The statistics surface showed detailed active workflow counts but contradictory zeroed summary totals, so treat its headline progress cautiously. The live transcription, account, device, and accessibility experience was not interactively tested, and submitted text still needs reconciliation and institutional quality control before it becomes a trusted collection record.

Who made it, and when?

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada with Notes from Nature is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is April 5, 2022.