Meeting Abstract
Natural history museums hold vast collections of glass microscope slides amassed from a variety of sources over the last 100 or more years. These slides were prepared in association with botanical and zoological studies, which ranged from comparative embryology, to wood anatomy, to plant-insect mutualisms. While such collections represent a unique and irreplaceable resource for studies of integrative and comparative biology, most are fragile or otherwise difficult to access and work with. Hence, they are largely ignored by contemporary researchers. We have developed a cost-effective, high-throughput and semi-automated workflow for digitally scanning and displaying slides of many different sizes characteristic of the collections of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Harvard University Herbaria, which is applicable to like collections at other institutions. The resulting high-resolution digital images, each depicting the contents of an entire slide, may be accessed via a customized web application that allows a variety of kinds of image analysis and data capture. Ready access to these historically and scientifically rich data sources will enable fruitful and timely collaborations between natural history museums and other branches of biology, such as neuroscience, physiology, developmental biology, functional morphology and ecology, and complements the growing number of digital-image repositories available via the Internet.
