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Digitization Services

Natural History

UNLOCK YOUR COLLECTION’S SCIENTIFIC POTENTIAL

Enter a Digital Renaissance in Natural History

As samples of our world’s biodiversity, natural history collections are an unparalleled source of knowledge and research, yet often inaccessible and underutilized. But with the highest quality digitization of your specimens — from botany to mineralogy, and zoology to paleontology — you can document and safeguard them while allowing the global scientific community ready access for study. You can also provide an online portal open to the general public, allowing them to share the beauty and wonder of the natural world, from current and historical specimens not normally on display.

Advanced digitization software can incorporate optical character reading and machine learning on a mass scale to automatically read hand-written labels, measure the surface area of an object, and even identify plants by species. Better yet, analysis of the metadata attached to the images, such as historical, geographic and taxonomic details, can help researchers uncover subtle trends, unlocking a treasure trove of insights to tackle the most fundamental scientific challenges of our time. With digitization, we are entering an era where your natural history collection becomes a time capsule that can illuminate the past, chart the present, and enable predictions for the future.

That’s where DT Heritage comes in.

 Our worldwide client base of major cultural and scientific institutions knows us as the authority on heritage digitization, with an in-depth understanding of the issues and challenges of working with your often fragile collections. DT Heritage offers specialized skills, techniques, and workflow experience, combined with advanced digitization technology purpose-built by our hardware division DT Heritage. Together, our team of experts in digitization hardware, software, services and workflow optimization work hand-in-hand to deliver a seamless experience for natural history imaging projects of every possible scope.

 

Why Digitization

Chronicle your organization’s history for easy access and use

Today, it’s vital that archives, libraries and institutions not only preserve their cultural assets, but also bring to life compelling stories from the past in ways that resonate today. Make the most of your assets with a useful, well-managed archive created with the highest quality digitization

FUNDRAISING

  • Create new licensing and branding opportunities for the unique items in your collection
  • Cultivate relationships with internal or external stakeholders
  • Bring new life to digital marketing campaigns with ads, social media posts, and other brand-building efforts that you can monetize

STORYTELLING

  • Offer new experiences by combining historical records, artwork and objects of every kind
  • Tell new stories about the artifacts in your collection
  • Digitally display previously inaccessible and underutilized objects from storage and archives
  • Enhance exhibitions and events with immersive experiences

ACCESS

  • Allow journalists, historians, researchers, writers, filmmakers, and marketers to access your collections
  • Use metadata to make every record and artifact fully searchable
  • Create on-line galleries of works to stimulate interest and engagement
  • Preserve your history — handle and digitize the items once, but access and reuse them in perpetuity, with the highest appropriate resolution for all applications
  • Head off the ravages of time through strategic redundancy

THE EXPERTS IN NATURAL HISTORY DIGITIZATION

OUR EXPERT SERVICES

DT Heritage helps news organizations, production companies, movie studios, songwriters, publishers, theaters, and other rights holders activate the power of their undigitized heritage by turning physical artifacts into searchable, accessible digital assets at the highest resolution available today. If you want to digitize your physical collection but don’t have the in-house expertise, then you need DT Heritage.

Many companies offer digital imaging services, but no one understands the particular requirements of heritage preservation quite like DT Heritage. Our specialists have decades of combined experience working inside library and museum imaging departments. They’ve blended their unique insiders’ viewpoint with superior technical knowledge to perfect the art and science of heritage digitization.

That’s who will be working for you — on-site and off — from planning through completion.

Some of the things that set DT Heritage apart:

  • Not sure where to start, how long it will take, what equipment you need, or how to pay for it? The DT Heritage team will help plan your project, including technology assessments and developing timelines and budgets, to determine the best solution for your project.
  • Film Scanning: DT Heritage has spent over a decade perfecting film scanning workflows that optimize efficiency, fulfill each client’s unique goals, and conform to the highest image quality standards.
  • Our specialists will design advanced digitization workflows that blend seamlessly with your daily operations. Our proprietary workflow software, DT PixelFlow, uses AI and other techniques to analyze the images and deliver best-in-class OCR, facial recognition, and metadata so that your stakeholders can easily find what they’re looking for when repurposing.
  • Rare books, manuscripts, room-size paintings, maps, deteriorating film, tabletop art, jewelry, even bees — we’ve brought all of that and more from the material world into the digital realm.
  • No need to risk handling, packing, and transporting your fragile, one-of-a-kind items. Wherever your collection is in the world, we’ll bring the team and equipment to you. Get the picture by reading about DT Heritage’s recent trip to Estonia.
  • DT Heritage produces images at up to 14K resolution, the highest image quality on the market and years ahead of the 6K that is just now becoming common. Since you’re making the effort to digitize, we make sure the quality stands the test of time — so that you can repurpose it in multiple ways well into the future.
  • So many of the world’s most demanding and respected organizations have trusted DT Heritage to digitize their prized collections, no matter their age, condition, size, or shape. Get the picture with our case studies.
Complete End-to-end Systems

Industry-leading Imaging Technology

We fully appreciate the importance of blending seamlessly into your institution’s daily operations, and can digitize your artifacts in our own facility, or on your own site if they can’t be moved from their permanent location. Our digitization hardware, and software enabled by artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, are designed to work together smoothly with carefully optimized workflows.

  • Purpose-built rapid-capture systems create an ultra-high-resolution digital copy of your collection quickly and systematically. The result: minimize cost and radically shorten the time required for capture.
  • DT Heritage’s DT PixelFlow software enables our team to make the most of digital assets by extracting, analyzing, and transcribing text using optical character recognition (OCR) and applying artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to provide facial, object, and geographic descriptive metadata information.
  • By combining DT Heritage hardware solutions, DT Heritage’s artificial intelligence (AI) processing software, and our team’s expertise, we can digitize anything – even deteriorating film or works on paper, and 3D objects like minerals, fossils, plants and animals – at a level of detail you cannot get anywhere else.

MAKE YOUR ASSETS WORK FOR YOU

ENHANCE THE VALUE OF OUR NATURAL HISTORY

The specimens in your collection are vital to grasping the science of taxonomy and the human need to understand the natural world. There is tremendous value in every one of these cultural assets, and digitization unlocks that potential. Scientists and researchers from around the world can access and analyze the combined data. Your staff and all your stakeholders can use your one-of-a-kind digital assets to create ads, social media campaigns, membership programs, and other brand-building efforts that raise your profile. Even license images to publishers and advertisers, or inspire a director with the historical information to accurately recreate the natural world of the past. The list is endless.

Digitization is the key to uncovering the full value of artifacts in natural history and art museums, libraries, archives, media and entertainment, sports franchises, and many other fields. The beauty of digital assets is that they are clearly differentiated, unique, endlessly reusable, and ideally suited to the digital and social media age. By digitizing your science or cultural collection and adding the assets to your content management system you can turn those precious items into new value . . .  and create a digital record of your history in the process!

Ballerinas On Stage

Celebrating 20 Years of Digitization Excellence - 2003-2023

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