Technological advancements over the past two decades have made information about types and other specimens housed in natural history collections available online in digital form, primarily for research purposes. In the past few years, more emphasis has been placed on digital imaging of specimens, in effect bringing the specimens out of their cabinets and increasingly into public view globally via the World Wide Web. This presentation will introduce full color, 3-dimensional imaging of external anatomy using photogrammetry, and will describe an architecture known as COPIS (Computer Operated Photogrammetric Imaging System) developed for rapid multi-camera, multi-view, image acquisition. In addition to 3D-imaging, the outputs of COPIS, may also be used in traditional 2-dimensional image analysis.
