SUMMARY
There has been a remarkable progress in digitisation of natural history collections all over the world during the last years. This certainly increases the potential use of collections and makes them available for study to a broader spectrum of researchers. This is particularly important at a time when there are increasing difficulties with sending specimens on loan across borders and visiting collections in certain countries. It has been assumed that digitisation would reduce the need for loans and visits to natural history collections, but against all expectations, as digitisation has proceeded, many custodians experienced the opposite effect: when information on the collections became available, more researchers became aware of what was in a given collection, leading in some cases to more loans and visits.
The present study was designed to test if digitisation of natural history collections reduces the need for physical access and physical loans in SYNTHESYS partner institutions as well as outside the consortium. It was based on review of published and unpublished documents and statistics from partners and two questionnaire-based surveys for collection custodians and collection users. We received 133 responses from custodians and 194 responses from collection users. The overall pattern in the statistics shows decrease in number of physical loans and visits. “Digital loans”, i.e., requests for digital information, on the contrary, show an increasing tendency. However, the questionnaire replies from custodians and users do not give a simple picture: in many cases they report more loans and/or visits, while others indicates less loans and/or visits, and others see “no change”. The clearest tendencies are that:
- Availability of digital images reduces the number of loans;
- According to the users, but not to the custodians, availability of digital images also reduces the number of visits;
- The highest degree of reduction of numbers of loans and visits is seen in herbaria; and
- Experienced custodians (= started working with collections before 2000) more often experience a decrease than an increase in loans and visits, whereas custodians who started after 1999 more often experienced an increase than a decrease.
It may be speculated if decline in number of loans and visits is solely an effect of progressively digitised collections since other factors such as declining economy (including reduced collection staff), increased travel costs, and difficulties with international shipping of material (increased regulations) may play an important role. Many participants also emphasized the fact that digitisation cannot fully replace physical loans and visits. There is still a need of support for transnational access, such as has been provided by the SYNTHESYS programmes.
