Last week I got the privilege of attending a workshop sponsored by iDigBio on Digitization and Databasing Natural Collection. Before I tell you more about the meeting, let me first tell you a little bit about iDigBio.
iDigBio stands for Integrated Digitized Biocollections and it is a program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's purpose is to serve as a resource for advancing digitization of biological collections. If you want to learn more about their workshops or the program itself, here is the link to their website - https://www.idigbio.org/
Now, a lot of people don't understand the importance of initiatives like this, so let me try to give you some insight. The digitization effort makes data and images for millions of biological specimens available electronically for everyone. Basically, it takes the wealth of data that can be found in museums or herbaria and puts it out on the internet so that it can be used for anything from simple curiosity to answering pivotal research questions.
So at this workshop, I got to hear stories from several important people and organizations in the realm of natural collections. Some organizations that had representatives at the meeting include the New York Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institue, Specify, iPlant, MorphBank, and a wide variety of smaller herbaria and collections across the United States. These representatives shared stories of their personal digitization efforts as well as some useful workflow tips and software to make the digitization process quicker and more efficient.
One thing I learned was that there is a program available for easing the burden of verifying specimen names (verifying that the name on the specimen is the most current and legitimate name for the species). This program comes from the iPlant collaborative and it is called Taxonomic Name Recognition Service. It allows you to upload a list of names that you want to verify and it runs all of the names through reputable sources and gives you the accepted name and a score for the name accuracy. This allowed us here at CMC to complete a task that used to take several hours, if not days, to about half an hour. Here's the link http://tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org/.
Next I want to show you the progress of organization here at CMC.
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| We got all the tables set up |
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| File cabinets set up and dissecting microscopes out and available for use |
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| Cabinets organized and appropriately labelled |
And we are making some progress in the cabinets as well.
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| Example Specimen |
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| Example Annotation |
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| Example Species Folder Label |
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| Example Genus Cover label |
-Taylor
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