NAHIMA– Natural science collections online
With the NAHIMA database, the ETH Library provides a virtual infrastructure that makes natural science collections accessible to researchers in an efficient and clear way.
Are you looking for references on the discovery and naming of new plant and animal species? Are you conducting research into the creation and evolution of life forms? On biodiversity? On the climate? Object collections are an important basis for natural science research, as they provide the information upon which new insights are based.
Use expert knowledge
ETH Zurich gives researchers access to the new NAHIMA database (Natural History Collections Management digitally) for their natural science collections. For the database, around 530,000 records and almost 462,000 media assets have been migrated from the Earth Science Collections, the Fungarium, the Xylotheque, the United Herbaria and the Entomological Collection so far.
Go online
With NAHIMA, collection management and object and image research can be carried out centrally. This important virtual infrastructure makes several important holdings available online – and therefore for researchers – for the first time.
Take your pick
Value lists for descriptions of records for taxonomy, people and institutions, as well as a gazetteer, are now available online. The GND authority files are integrated, and a plug-in is used to compare with the species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.
Please note that users without the respective rights only have limited access to the affected records.
Get connected
The system uses standard interfaces and formats to provide a two-way exchange of data and metadata (OAI-PMH, RESTful API, Dublin Core, Darwin Core, ABCD, ABCDEFG, etc.). This means that you can get connected and exchange knowledge quickly.
