NSW Herbarium completes five-year archive digitisation

The National Herbarium of NSW has gone live with a digital archive documenting over 1 million plant species using cloud storage from Amazon Web Services.

National Herbarium of NSW

The herbarium, which is based at the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan in western Sydney,  launched the publicly available repository of its 1.4 million plant specimens on January 6.

According to NSW Herbarium, the platform's launch marks the “largest mass digitisation of a natural history collection undertaken in the southern hemisphere”.

The launch follows a five-year project that saw Herbarium staff take 4000 images a day to “transform plant specimens into a high-resolution image”.

The collection of images was uploaded into AWS, which is covering the cost of publicly storing the datasets as part of the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program.

According to the Minister of Planning and Public Spaces, Anoulack Chanthivong, the archive contains more than 800 specimens collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage in 1770.

“To see the transformation from an 18th-century specimen library to a cutting-edge digital collection for public use is quite extraordinary,” Botanic Gardens of Sydney CEO Simon Duffy said.