Digitization of analogue records in time (DO IT!)
Records of environmental observations exist for decades before the digital era either as hand-written values or registrations from measuring instruments. Unfortunately, these data are most often not digitized yet and hence are not accessible, although it would be highly valuable for long-term analyses, trend detections or similar. Usually the data are digitized manually by internships, student assistants or employees if there is some spare time. Due to the required manpower, this way of digitization will take several decades to be completed. Furthermore, the quality of paper records can degrade significantly over time. In many places, there is a risk of losing these unique data in the cellars of public authorities.
The novelty of our approach is to enable the involvement of numerous volunteers without scientific background (citizen scientists =CS) by breaking down the time-consuming part of the digitization to an easy applicable smartphone application. By providing scans of the analogue data the CS can type the hand-written numbers into a standardized table. Beside the digitalized data, the most important outcome of the project is the developed smartphone app, which can flexibly handle different types of data and thus be transferred to other scientific fields.
The smartphone app can be found here:
https://doit.lwi.bau.tu-bs.de/en/index.html
It is accessible from desktop and smartphone users, enabling the digitization whenever there is some spare time to be filled with meaningful action.
Funding: This work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (NFDI4Earth, DFG project no. 460036893, https://www.nfdi4earth.de/).
Duration: February – October 20204
Contact: Dr.-Ing. Müller-Thomy, Hannes