Minimum Information about a Digital Specimen

Open for comment

Public Review

Public Review has begun! The Public Review for the Minimum Information about a Digital Specimen (MIDS) Standard is open for 60 days, from October 5th, 2026 until December 4th, 2026. Feedback is welcome from anyone who digitizes, manages, publishes, or uses natural science specimen data, in any discipline. Comments from people outside the Task Group are especially valuable, and confirming that an entry is correct is useful feedback too.

You can contribute through GitHub issues or the MIDS feedback workbook; both count equally. For step-by-step instructions, see the Public Review page.

What is Under Review

The review covers four resources, all published on the Information Elements page. Each has its own sheet in the MIDS Feedback Workbook.

Resource What it contains
Disciplines The three collection disciplines MIDS covers (Biology, Paleontology, Geology), with definitions and sources.
Levels The four cumulative MIDS levels (MIDS0 Bare, MIDS1 Basic, MIDS2 Intermediate, MIDS3 Extended), with definitions, notes, and purposes.
Information Elements All 21 MIDS information elements, with definitions, purposes, usage notes, examples, and the disciplines that require them.
Discipline Schema Which information element is required at which MIDS level for each discipline.

Important Note!
Only these four resources are subject to review. Examples of information elements, the mappings, and the resources page are non-normative: they clarify the normative documentation but are not under formal review.

How to Participate
  1. Explore the standard. Read the Information Elements, Mappings, and About pages, and try the tools on the Resources page, such as the MIDS Calculator. Testing MIDS against your own collection data is an excellent basis for feedback.
  2. Comment on GitHub. Search the MIDS issues to see whether your topic has already been raised (issues labelled MIDS Element hold the working definitions of individual elements). Comment on an existing issue, or open a new one naming the element, level, or discipline concerned (e.g., "StratigraphicContext – Geology MIDS2") and describe the change you propose and why.
  3. Or use the feedback workbook. No GitHub account is needed. Make your own copy of the MIDS Feedback Workbook (File → Make a copy, or download as .xlsx), enter your feedback in the orange columns, and share or email it to mids@geospecimens.org.
  4. Comment anonymously by saying so explicitly when you send feedback to the Review Manager. Your name and any identifying information will be removed before your comments are added to the public record.
After the Review

All comments will be public and archived following the review. Comments received after December 4th, 2026, may be deferred and addressed through normal maintenance after ratification. When the review closes, the Review Manager will compile every comment and record a recommended action for each; the MIDS Task Group will then revise the draft before requesting ratification by the TDWG Executive Committee. To stay informed, join the MIDS Task Group mailing list.

For questions, comments, or critiques, please contact Sharon Grant, Review Manager of MIDS, Field Museum of Natural History, at sgrant@fieldmuseum.org.

Standards live and die based on community, and public review is one of the best opportunities to support them.
Thanks!
- The MIDS Task Group
Last Updated: Oct. 1, 2026

Full public review instructions and TDWG process →

What is MIDS?

The Minimum Information about a Digital Specimen (MIDS) standard has been designed to provide a means of measuring and monitoring the level of digitization of specimens within a collection. It provides guidance for prioritizing the data to be captured as well as recommendations for data standards and mapping structures.

MIDS specifies the information elements expected to be present when providing access to specimens within a digital framework. Digital specimens are online digital representations of their physical counterparts in natural science collections. The definition of digitization used here is making physical objects digitally available in terms of data and/or media. Several 'levels of digitization' (0-3) represent a simple categorization of the type and depth of digitization achieved by different approaches to digitization. These are defined in detail in the Information Elements page.

The need to rapidly digitize millions of specimens in Natural History Collections has led to a staged approach for data capture being widely adopted. Mass digitization programs have generally started with the creation of skeletal or stub records, which can then be expanded as more funding or support becomes available. When combined with the previous practice of creating relatively complete data records for each specimen, there is currently a significant variation in the level of digitization both within and between collections.

MIDS defines what information about a specimen should be available but it does not attach specific value to that information because attaching value depends both upon the information itself and the purpose to which that is put.

Getting started links

Aims

  • To provide a metric for the digitisation of collections
  • To assist in the prioritisation of data to be published to make digital specimen information useful for multiple purposes of research, teaching, and learning

Outcomes of these aims include:

  • To improve the quality of published data by providing recommendations to collection managers about relevant data standards and ontologies
  • To support and contribute towards assessments of fitness for purpose of data (suitability) for feeding specific types of data processing pipelines
  • To assist researchers to know what information to include in their publications about specimens they have used in their research
  • To enable efficient querying, aggregation, and self-contained data processing by computing systems (machine-actionability, de Smedt 2020) based on provision of rich contextual (meta)data in compliance with the FAIR principles (Wilkinson 2016)

Audience

This document is intended primarily for those who are responsible for digitizing and sharing data publicly (publishing data) about natural science specimens. It can also be useful to those who are developing applications, tools and workflows related to digitization, comparing and evaluating digitization projects, and for those reporting to collection management personnel, and funding agencies. Whilst it may be possible to use the specification for occurrence information that are not physical specimens, it has not been designed for this wider use.

How to use MIDS for digitization planning

The MIDS standard sits at the heart of all aspects of the digitization process and can be used to build a digitization strategy and programme. A digitization strategy includes typically sections covering the vision, the reasons for digitizing, the intended users of the digitized specimens, the scope and prioritization, the strategic objectives, and metrics of success and impact (https://dissco.github.io/DigitisationPlanning/DigPlanning.html). MIDS is crucial for achieving success metrics. The mapping of data within MIDS is a key part of building the data structure within a digitization programme, including mapping to Darwin Core or ABCDEFG and publication on international aggregator portals such as GBIF, GeoCASE, MinDat, etc.

The recommendations included in the MIDS elements will help decision-making about the relevant standards to use, including identifiers. This data structure will also aid in managing data within an institutional collections management system (CMS) and with ancillary processes, such as citizen science portals.

The different levels of MIDS relate to a staged digitization programme, which may require different funding, equipment, and workflows for each stage of the process. Using MIDS will help identify costs for each stage of digitization, as each level has a clearly defined minimum set of information. Each MIDS digitization level has been determined to reflect a broad use case, helping to build a business case for funding. In addition, the information elements within each MIDS level have a definition and a purpose to support communication to encourage buy-in from colleagues or funders.

How to use MIDS to prioritize digitization

The information elements within each MIDS level have been selected through a process of discussion and deliberation over several years. These elements represent the data that have formed the basis of many large-scale digitization programmes, and hence have previously been prioritized or have been agreed as being of high importance at each stage of digitization.

It was recognized that, at higher MIDS levels, there were sufficient differences in the data between Biology, Geology, and Palaeontology to warrant a distinction between the information elements required at MIDS levels 2 and 3.

The MIDS level aimed at within a digitization programme will depend on many factors, including funding and local priorities. The definition, purpose, recommendations, and mapping provided by MIDS will enable an institution to determine which level of MIDS is to be selected as the goal for the collection.

It is important to keep in mind that MIDS defines the “Minimum” information at each level, and it is strongly encouraged to capture more information if possible.

How to calculate MIDS

The MIDS score can be calculated for an individual specimen by assessing the information required for each MIDS level and the information present in the digitised specimen. The data can be mapped to Darwin Core terms or the Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) Schema and then to the MIDS information elements using the mapping examples provided.

To make the calculations easier, tools are being developed to enable the MIDS score to be calculated for each specimen within large datasets. These tools work on existing datasets in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) or the Distributed System of Scientific Collections or users can create their own datasets in Darwin Core Archive format (Guidance) or in ABCD format. These tools make calculating the MIDS score for large collections possible, as well as providing the results in a format to enable users to understand the data which are impacting the MIDS score.

Last Modified: 2026-10-07