PangeaDB® reinvents the digitisation of the natural world

The Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona (MCNB) has more than 140 years of history and is one of the most visited museums in the city. With a heritage of over three million specimens spanning mineralogy, petrology, palaeontology, zoology and botany, its purpose is to share, preserve and communicate the diversity of the natural world.

The challenge: a collection that overwhelms any generic catalogue

Every specimen in a collection is the product of its own history — from the moment it was collected through to its later accession and conservation in the museum. Although visitors see a large number of items on display, these represent only a very small percentage of the pieces held in the museum's stores.

Each specimen also carries an abundant and varied body of data: identifying information of every kind (images, systematic classification terms), location, conservation status, usage, and more. Unifying all of it in a single application goes far beyond simple categorisation.

The solutions available on the market were either too rigid to adapt to the specific needs of each collection, or required so much design work that the result would end up owned by an external company holding the copyright. That is why the curatorial team for the mineralogy, petrology and palaeontology collections at MCNB chose a local, fully personalised development instead.

Developing PangeaDB® was a real challenge, made possible by working hand in hand with the curators and technicians at the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona, who knew exactly what they needed, and by the flexibility of the Claris FileMaker platform. The hardest part was building the hierarchy trees matching the thesaurus levels, so that entering a term at a lower level automatically populates the levels above it.

The solution: a supercontinent of data

The application was named PangeaDB® after the supercontinent that existed millions of years ago, formed by the union of today's separate continents. Translated to the digital world, that is exactly what the team wanted from their collections manager: all information unified, linked and hierarchical, accessible quickly and intuitively.

This was never just about digitising and storing. The brief was to design an application from scratch that would support collection management in the broadest sense — including conservation, research, communication and public engagement.

Thesauri: the key technical building block

Thesauri are structured lists of related terms representing concepts, and they are what genuinely speeds up the digitisation process. PangeaDB® implements four:

Public engagement and multimedia modules

One of a museum's core functions is sharing the content of its collections. PangeaDB® stores graphic and photographic documents linked to specimens, and organises everything else into dedicated modules:

Mobility, Smart Design and bulk data handling

Information is accessible both on site at the museum and over the web, when the team needs to work remotely or from different devices. One of PangeaDB®'s ongoing research and development strands is user experience (Smart Design): fast, intuitive interfaces that adapt to the device in use. The phone and tablet interface matters especially, since capturing data in the field is essential.

The application is also built for bulk data handling, with import tools that quickly add data associated with a collection, and mass export for use in other digital platforms.

Results

• Significant time savings on data entry
• Lighter load in handling administrative procedures
• Far more efficient specimen location
• Access from the museum and remotely, on any device

"We wanted an application that went further — one that would give us access to all the information about our specimens, and let us fully manage every aspect related to the collections."

This case study has been published by Claris in its Customer Stories section. FileMaker Projects is an official member of the Claris Partners programme.