Reading Inventory Cards. Automatic Extraction of Structured Information from Collection Records

This presentation was given during the WiNoDa winter school, a five-day intensive course on the topic of Research with Natural Science Collections. Data, Quality, and Methods from 24-28 November 2025. Organization: German Federation for Biological Data e.V. (GFBio) with support from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle Open Access Brandenburg (VuK) Abstract: Physical, paper-based inventory cards are ubiquitary across most collections. Beyond recognizing the text on the cards, their digitization also requires mapping that text to data fields. In this session, we discuss practical pipelines covering OCR, mapping text to database fields, post-processing, and integration with content management and database systems.