Natural History collections often contain objects of cultural heritage value and vice versa. These objects can be linked through the use of simple vocabularies and machine-readable metadata which allow for the clustering of objects beyond their source collections. One platform to achieve synergies between natural history and cultural heritage is Europeana.
Europeana is the EU digital platform for cultural heritage, but also contains over 9 million biodiversity objects mainly described by scientific data. Europeana has the aim of being as open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as possible by involvement in the development of open web APIs, Linked Data and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
One of the projects working on accomplishing the connection between Natural and Cultural heritage is LinBi (Linking Biodiversity and Culture Information) which has a focus on Europe’s biodiversity content. LinBi provided new content to Europeana, a large portion of which was first enriched via the crowdsourcing
platform DOEDAT. Furthermore LinBi has built infrastructure to produce content clusters which are used to connect digital objects of a common theme.
The quality of the metadata of digitized objects is vital to the reusability and interoperability of a collection, and subsequently allows for the publication of the enriched digital objects with a reach beyond their own source collection. These contributions by citizen scientists are incredibly valuable and both allow a broader
audience to engage with the materials as well as unlock information that was previously unobtainable.
The efforts invested in connecting the Natural and Cultural heritage can lead to new research possibilities on existing and future collections, and allows the data hidden in these collections to be more accessible for both research and non research user groups.