Case Study: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh achieves a searchable, digitised herbarium with ABBYY Recognition Server

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Herbarium Collection Evolves with ABBYY Recognition Server

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is a world‑renowned centre for plant science and education with an herbarium of some 3 million pressed specimens. Faced with the need to digitise centuries of labels—many handwritten or in varied fonts, languages and formats dating back to 1690—RBGE needed a way to automate capture of label text and replace slow, error‑prone manual data entry so collections could be searched and shared online.

RBGE implemented ABBYY Recognition Server to OCR high‑resolution TIFF images, producing searchable image PDFs and plain‑text files that feed into their MySQL database and website. The solution integrated with existing workflows, greatly reduced manual entry, improved the completeness and accuracy of specimen records (supporting dozens of languages and many font styles), and made the collection easily searchable and accessible to researchers worldwide.

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Elspeth Haston

Assistant Curator for Digitisation