Brett Summerill has announced on LinkedIn that the Herbarium at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney is a finalist in the National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards.
Earlier this year we made over a million herbarium specimens available to everyone via a state-of-the-art searchable image platform.
Now the project is a finalist in the National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards, acknowledging the scale and historical significance of the work.
2025 National Trust (NSW) Heritage Awards finalists revealed
This was the first mass digitisation of a major herbarium collection in the Southern Hemisphere, and was achieved by an advanced conveyor belt system capable of capturing more than 3,000 high-resolution images daily – you can see a small snippet of the work involved in this video.
National Herbarium of New South Wales
This project involved an enormous pool of people from across the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, the Foundation & Friends of the Botanic Gardens, many generous donors, more than 250 volunteers, and collaborators including Picturae, Alembo and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
It was led by Andre Badiou, Melissa Wong, Claire Brandenburger, Wayne Cherry, Steven Glennie and Hannah McPherson from the Botanic Gardens of Sydney.
