Rapid Data Entry: Supporting high-throughput digitisation workflows in EMu

Presentation given at the Taxonomic Data Working Group (TDWG) meeting, 28 October 2014 - Jönköping, Sweden

Abstract: Over the next five years the Natural History Museum is embarking on a programme to digitise significant numbers of specimens with the aim to make the resulting data freely available online in the museum's Data Portal. In order to support this a new highly customisable web-based platform, Rapid Data Entry (RDE), has been developed for the museum’s content management system, EMu.

RDE is composed of three parts: 1) a project creation and administration interface that allows data managers to create customisable web applications for specific digitisation projects that directly reference back-end fields in EMu; 2) forms for rapid data entry and editing that can be used on both desktop and mobile clients; 3) editors that support the normalisation of data.

The general advantages and disadvantages of an alternative web interface to a traditional desktop client are discussed along with potential new workflows such as: specimen relocation via barcodes, condition checking, collections audit and other targeted data capture activities.