A New Era for the Singapore Herbarium
The Singapore Botanic Gardens has embarked on its largest digitization effort ever, launching an ambitious project to digitize around 800,000 herbarium specimens. Marking both a 150-year legacy and a decade as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the initiative sets a new benchmark for global botanical preservation.
Largest Digitization Effort to Date
The Singapore Botanic Gardens has launched it largest digitization project to date: The Singapore Herbarium Digitization Project. Together with Picturae, around 800,000 specimens from the Herbarium will be digitized by the end of 2027. This groundbreaking initiative marks both the Herbarium’s 150th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of the Garden’s designation as Singapore’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
First in its kind
What makes this project truly unique is that it is the world’s first publicly accessible live viewing gallery for herbarium digitization. In the exhibition Pressed in Pixels, visitors can watch a process that is normally hidden from sight: specimens being unpacked, labeled, scanned and returned. The gallery is free to visit and invites everyone to explore and appreciate tropical plant diversity in an entirely new way.
Cutting-Edge Technology
With our automated conveyor-belt imaging system, Picturae offers cutting-edge digitization technology that turns a task that would normally take a large team more than a decade into a process that can be completed in about one year, all the while preserving fragile historical specimens and generating high-resolution images with metadata for global access.
Your Collection
If your herbarium is exploring the possibility of digitization, we are always glad to share our experience and discuss what such a project might involve. Feel free to reach out if you would like to learn more about the process or the options available for preserving and opening up your collection for future research.
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