Small Collections Herbarium Workshop and Favorite Encounters

Things have been busy in the Herbarium, and busier in the world of Academia. My classes have certainly been keeping me on my toes--and my cold has kept me attached to my kleenex box. Hence, I am ashamed to say that I have been neglecting my duties as a plant librarian scribe. Much has happened in the past few weeks. Most notably, Dr. Monfils, Emilie, and I presented at the Small Collections Herbarium Workshop hosted here at CMU on October 20th. It was a wonderful experience. I got to meet a lot of very knowledgeable, friendly Herbarians (is that a word? Or perhaps it is a special, distinct culture of people who are passionate about plants). I discovered that almost everyone had the same challenges as we did, and I also learned some of the innovations they had come up with to deal with them.

For instance, we have decided to start barcoding right beside the specimen label instead of in the far left corner, so that when Silver Biology processes our photos to put the text in the database, they will have an easier time of double-checking that the barcode matches up with the specimen photograph.

Overall, it was really enlightening to see all of the different ways in which people had solved the same problems, especially when it came to unique approaches to databasing and organizing Herbariums of multiple sizes. I would like to think that the CMC Herbarium is making great progress, and that we were able to share some of our progress and suggestions with the other attendees of the workshop.

We have continued to march on in our efforts over the last few weeks. We have mostly been organizing, name verifying, and annotating. The first five cabinets are now completely annotated, and we have organized halfway through cabinet 9. I also made some milestones with digitization. I have barcoded almost 1,200 specimens, and the proud specimen below had the distinct honor of being the 1,000th photograph for our database:

This Gymnocarpium dryopteris, family Woodsiaceae, had the honor of being the 1000th photograph for our Digitization Project.

I also had some interesting finds this week. First off, I would like to know whose idea this was:

Acrostichum danaeifolium

Also, when Voss leaves a note saying something was unidentifiable, you know it's true. Just like several folders of Amalanchier sp. I found this week whilst organizing Rosaceae:

Also, the Crataegus genus in Rosaceae brought some painful memories to the fore. When I was sixteen, I thought it would be a grand idea one summer to ride my bike full tilt down a steep hill. It was all fun and games and the wind in my hair until I hit the sharp corner at the bottom. I was going too fast, my brake was broken, and I wasn't able to make the turn. I ended up riding head-on into a large rock, which proceeded to catapult me into a large and rather prickly Hawthorne tree. The specimens below reminded me vividly of the four-inch thorns that ripped through my scalp and gave me a concussion that summer.