Georeferencing the Natural History Museum's Chinese type collection: of plateaus, pagodas and plants

The digitising efforts of herbaria aim to increase access to and impact of scientific collections, by making the data digitally accessible to the global community. Digitising the NHMUK’s botanical collection of around 5.1 million specimens is an ongoing process, but the majority of the type collections have already been imaged. The Chinese type collection has also been transcribed; however, during the recent georeferencing process, we realised that much of the data had been transcribed incorrectly, particularly the locality information in which 80% of the collection contained errors. We discovered 154 specimens that were mistakenly filed in China. We corrected the mistakes from the previous transcription and georeferenced the collection which consists of 3,736 records. In this paper, we discuss the problems and errors we encountered during the georeferencing process, detailing why there were mistakes, what made the transcription harder than expected and what could have led to errors. We also give a short description about the Chinese language and its difference from European languages, leading to complex problems for georeferencing. We provide a brief guide on how to georeference a Chinese collection, avoiding errors and making the georeferencing process easier and faster.