TDWG2026
Home / Talks / SAL C
talk · Tuesday 22 September · 09:20–⁠09:35 · SAL C

Improving geospecimen provenance and findability in the National Museums Scotland Scottish mineral collection

Sarah Stewart · Rocks, Minerals, and Metadata: Integrating Earth Sciences into the TDWG Community

Recording time 46:10–1:02:05Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionA scripted, reviewable workflow can quickly reconcile legacy mineral records and enrich them with Mindat coordinates, while giving data back to the community resource.

Overview

What this was about

Sarah Stewart, a computational chemistry PhD student, reported on a two-month internship improving provenance for the roughly 18,000-specimen Scottish mineral collection at National Museums Scotland. She merged transcribed historical ledgers with modern museum records, parsed locality strings into hierarchical levels, standardised names to IMA species and Dana/Strunz classes, and matched unique localities to Mindat to add coordinates, using Python scripts plus manual review. The pipeline exposed record problems (26,000 records for 18,000 specimens, about 1,000 without IDs, 15,000 duplicates needing triage) and resulted in 16,000 validated specimens, while the museum contributed new species occurrences and almost 2,000 new localities back to Mindat.

Why it matters. Shows a transferable, low-cost approach for georeferencing and cleaning geological collection data, and a two-way model of exchange with crowdsourced databases like Mindat.

Key ideas

In the room

  • The collection spans about 200 years; locality precision ranges from mine depth to just 'Scotland'.
  • A dual legacy problem: historical ledgers (transcribed) and modern digitised records each contain information missing from the other.
  • Localities were split into hierarchical levels (country, county, region/loch, town/parish/hill, quarry/mine) to preserve detail that external databases often flatten.
  • Mindat localities were evaluated for feature type and how coordinates should be treated (e.g. mine entrance vs mountain summit).
  • Scripts took about a day to run/write; the whole project took two months.
  • Gave to Mindat: about 900 new species occurrences, 475 existing localities and almost 2,000 new localities; gained just over 5,000 Scottish specimens' worth of locality information and mineral coverage data.
  • Coverage analysis found 366 minerals recorded from Scotland not held in the collection, and 11 held by the museum not otherwise known from Scotland.
Jump in

Notable moments

In their words

Transcript

Automatically generated captions can contain mistakes, especially in names and technical terms. Times are relative to the room recording.

Read the transcript ↓
Loading transcript…
Keep exploring

Related talks.

See the map ↗
talk · 25 Sept · 11:30–⁠11:42 · SAL A

Enhancing Biodiversity Georeferencing Using Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs

LLM preprocessing plus knowledge-base matching fills in locality hierarchies and proposes coordinates, with a review tool to keep humans in control.

Roselyn Gabud
talk · 22 Sept · 09:50–⁠10:05 · SAL C

Developing and implementing a relational mineral taxonomy model in EMu for Museums Victoria's mineral collection

Linking catalogue records to shared, Mindat-populated mineral taxonomy records makes mineral identification data consistent and queryable.

Oskar Lindenmayer
talk · 22 Sept · 10:05–⁠10:20 · SAL C

Understanding geological specimen use for effective digitisation strategies

Evidence from inquiries, loans and publications shows geological specimens have diverse, sometimes unexpected uses, which should shape which data are digitised first.

Rachel Walcott, Adam Mansur
Programme abstract

Improving geospecimen provenance and findability in the National Museums Scotland Scottish mineral collection

Sarah Stewart

Geospecimen metadata is only as valuable as it is findable. Specimens can be located through a variety of properties - for example by species, donor, location in the museum or provenance in the field. Unfortunately, place names are not always unique and historic descriptions are often ambiguous, inconsistent, and difficult to georeference at scale. Therefore, grid references are better but how many curators have time to look this up manually? We present a curatorial workflow using the National Museums Scotland collection of Scottish minerals - about 18000 specimens collected over 200 years, with variable quality and certainty of provenance. It reconciles legacy mineral names, standardises locality information, and where possible, links specimens to structured localities and coordinates from external resources such as Mindat API. Provenance is treated not as a single point on a map, but as a spectrum of certainty and scale, ranging from a specific named mine shaft to a whole district or county. Museum documentation can therefore preserve uncertainty and locality granularity that are often flattened in external resources. Linking collection records with Mindat can strengthen locality data through grid references and occurrence context, while the museum record retains curatorial detail. This process improves discovery by enabling specimens to be found by searching at any scale, from broad region to specific locality. Museums can not only draw on external data but also use internal collection records to identify missing or faulty data. Moreover, minerals in the collection not yet recorded from Scotland in Mindat are readily identified. This enriches both information sources, and demonstrates geocollections as active contributors to data infrastructure development.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.