Talk: 3D fossils and digitising collections

As part of the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival, I was invited to give a talk on 3D fossils and digitising collections.



Digitising Collections - images, anaglyphs and 3d digital models

I am particularly interested in promoting access to collections and information through digitisation and web delivery – an area in which the British Geological Survey is a world leader. We have delivered photographs via the web for many years – e.g. the National Building Stone Collection (4300 images) . Use of the JP2 (JPEG 2000) format allows web access to high resolution images, and has been used for several collections including UK continental shelf hydrocarbon well core samples (See for example ). It has also been used for the Historical maps of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland and Magnetograms . We have recently used it for high resolution fossil images, including stereo anaglyphs in the GB3D fossil types online project , and high resolution images of petrological thin sections (30 µ thick rock slices) – or search the database . The ultimate form of specimen digitisation is the 3d digital model. The GB3D project has captured several thousand such models.

For digitisation to make a difference, it needs a critical mass. The UK hydrocarbon core photographs total 125,000 and the rock thin sections represent 100,000 rocks.

For further details, my Presentation may be downloaded from ftp.bgs.ac.uk/pubload/mhowe/