In museums everywhere, collections departments are troves of historical objects, art, cultural artifacts, and scientific specimens. In our increasingly digital age, it’s easy to forget that in many cases, a good amount—sometimes even the majority—of records are documented in heavy, physical catalogues or accession registers. And over the course of decades or even centuries, labels can get damaged, items can go awol, or in the worst case scenario, fire or water damage can destroy these valuable resources.
In a sense, these analog databases are just as important as the objects they document, providing information about provenance and materials. In filing drawers, cases, and archival boxes, pieces are labeled one way or another. Archaeological potsherds, for example, may be labeled right on the piece with varnish and ink. At the Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, tiny invertebrates are preserved alongside ornate, handwritten labels that harken back to our not-so-distant pre-digital age.
One problem with the old system of analog record-keeping is that access is limited, and only those most intimately acquainted with a particular collection may know that something is there at all. Finding items often requires some old fashioned sleuthing. But thanks to growing online resources, museums are increasingly working to make their holdings more accessible to both researchers and the public.
A new exhibition, Making the Invisible Visible: Digitizing Invertebrates on Microscope Slides, highlights Harvard’s diverse collection comprising more than 50,000 examples. Many are well over 100 years old, including a slide containing a soft coral specimen inscribed with, “sent to James Dwight Dana by Charles Darwin.” Some include whole insects, while others feature only wings or antennae.
The exhibition marks an extension of an ambitious project launched in 2024 to bring the collection into the 21st century by digitizing more than 3,000 specimens. This includes locating, restoring, rehousing, and capturing high-resolution images so that the collection can be published online for use by researchers around the world. Indeed, even the addition of QR code labels to the 19th-century objects is a thought-provoking juxtaposition of historical and contemporary archiving techniques. How will scientists use these another century from now?
Making the Invisible Visible is now on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
