Many natural history collections have links to colonial pasts, and violent extraction practices are intertwined with their material value. We propose treating digitization practices for colonial natural history collections as research, and emphasize the need for analysis and discussion of the colonial past and metadata design to fully display their complexities and ambiguities.
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Acknowledgements
V.D.D., S.A., K.K., I.H. and D.S. thank the DFG (project number 511945957) for funding.
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Díez Díaz, V., Akhlaq, S., Kaiser, K. et al. Digitization as a research methodology in colonial natural history collections. Nat. Rev. Biodivers. 1, 145–146 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00031-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00031-2
