Photo Story Objects in a museum How we digitise our collections

The ways we create digital images of museum collections can breathe new life into them. It creates accessibility, engages audiences and sparks new conversations. At the Übersee-Museum Bremen, we digitise different collections with different criteria.

From insects and birds to documents and vaults, in this image slideshow, we take you behind the scenes digitising some of our collections.

Learn more about the stories from the “Blue Continent”

Wooden cabinet with lots of drawers and white labels — The Übersee Museum’s collections contain more than a million objects. Making them accessible is a huge task. On this cabinet, you can see the small white labels that can be used to manage each location in this cabinet in the database.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A camera with a display, with a stuffed bird standing in the background — Birds and other small to large animals are photographed at a photo station. A small card with colour checker and measurements, as well as all labels found on the collection objects, is photographed at in the same shot.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A person is standing in front of a camera setup that is lit from the sides – in the background is a computer in a dark room — Plants, which are placed flat on sheets of paper, are placed under a fixed camera. In the background, you can see the computer that controls the camera capture. With help from the software on the computer, the image can be viewed and all settings can be controlled.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A person sitting at a computer, seen from behind; next to them is a photo station with lighting, on which is a box of butterflies — Insects are photographed in the drawer in which they are stored. This way, several animals can be digitally photographed at the same time. The picture can be checked on the computer that controls the camera.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A person is standing at the photo station with a handheld scanner and is pointing the scanner at a label attached to a box — Each label is also provided with a code that a scanner can read and transmit the information to the computer. This QR code is a visual version of an internationally unique number that is written to the file after scanning.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A person sitting at a computer, seen from behind; a large insect is visible on the screen — Very small animals can also be photographed using microscopy: digital microscope images can be created at this station. This means that even the smallest details can be examined using digital images.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A blue Kompaktus cabinet with drawers — If you imagine the quantity of objects, it quickly turns out that photographing alone is not enough. You would never be able to find anything in the amount of photos again …
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A view inside a drawer containing cards — … that’s why it is so important that each object is managed in a database alongside with all its metadata information and also its location. And there is a lot of additional information in many different sources that also needs to be digitized and recorded – here, for example, information on punched cards.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

A long, narrow wooden object is placed on a white paper base by a person; photographic lighting is set up — Many objects are photographed inside the depots on a white surface with a white background. This way, the objects remain close to their depot location, and the photo station moves through the depots.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Übersee-Museum Bremen, photo: Volker Beinhorn

Birds, plants and insects How do you digitise … collections in a museum

As a follow-up to the photo story, we show you how plants, birds, and insects from the natural history collection are digitised in the Übersee Museum

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Find more stories …

As part of preparing our permanent exhibition “The Blue Continent—Islands in the Pacific,” we’ve built networks and collected stories. There are more stories to discover here!