Natural history collections contain a huge amount of information on diversity, distribution and ecology of species. Unfortunately, this valuable information is not always available to researchers due to historical and practical constraints. The project we describe aims especially to unlock data handwritten in notebooks owned by Culicidae researcher Johanna Bonne-Wepster. The handwritten notes refer to specimens labeled only with a number. The notebooks were scanned and entered in a Google-Spreadsheet. The specimens were provided with a unique identifier, labeled with the information contained in the notebooks and the data exported to GBIF. In addition, type specimens were photographed.
Beside the collection owned by Johanna Bonne-Wepster, mosquitoes from the former Rijksmuseum voor Natuurlijk Historie collection and the former Zoölogisch Museum Amsterdam Nederland collection were digitized. All specimens are now housed at Naturalis Biodiversity Center museum in Leiden.
This paper describes the efforts made to mobilize the data and the problems we encountered.
