University of Glasgow · MVLS

MVLS Virtual Microscopy Catalogue

Search, review and prepare teaching slides from the virtual microscopy archive.

Archive Reconciliation Summary

Status of the teaching-slide digitisation archive following reconciliation of the Dent, LifeSci, and Vet collections against the legacy metadata record. Dental School Archive is counted within Dent below — the same collection, catalogued under an earlier legacy folder name. As of 12 August 2026. For a breakdown by organ and tissue instead of by collection, see the Organ & Tissue Census.

Total slides
3,474
every digitised record
Active slides
3,440
available for teaching
Annotations
2,979
Expert-reviewed (EXP)
823
Thumbnails pending
0

Slides by collection

MVLS Archive
2,947
Dent
174
LifeSci
48
Vet
305

Detail by collection

"—" marks a curation flag that hasn't been assessed yet for that collection, not a confirmed zero. The table is wider than this card — scroll it sideways to see every column.

Collection Total Active Corrupt / duplicate Annotations Expert-reviewed Z-stack Multiview Comparison Thick section Thumbnails pending
MVLS Archive 2,9472,94702,602823 21619010520
Dent 17417312290 131180 0
LifeSci 481632520 42200
Vet 3053041960 900 0
Total 3,4743,440342,979823 2423301052 0

The 22 slides that were missing a thumbnail (14 in Dent, 8 in Vet) — automated generation had failed on multi-scene or multi-frame files where the imaging library couldn't reliably pick a single representative image — now all have one, via manual QuPath export for 2 and a direct-pyramid-access (vips) fallback for the remaining 20. One exception: slide 4366 (Vet) carries a placeholder thumbnail only — its file has a genuine data corruption issue at full resolution, separate from the thumbnail-generation problem, and is flagged for Vet School review.

Reading this summary

Total
Every digitised slide record, active or not.
Active
Slides available in the catalogue for teaching use — i.e. Total minus the corrupt/duplicate slides below.
Corrupt / duplicate
Files that failed to open, or whose content exactly matches a slide already in the archive — retained for record, excluded from teaching use.
Expert-reviewed (EXP)
Slides carrying historical expert contributor commentary. This body of work predates the Dent, LifeSci, and Vet imports, so it is concentrated entirely in MVLS Archive.
Comparison
A manual curator flag pairing slides for side-by-side teaching. Not yet assessed for the newly-added collections.