The New York Botanical Garden: The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium | THIRTEEN - New York Public Media

Dr. Monfils found this cool video of Barbara Thiers, Ph.D., Director of the Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Gardens, discussing her collection of over 7 million specimens. It is absolutely flabbergasting what they have managed to accomplish! I don’t know what Sascha and I would do if we had to digitize that many! I guess we would do the same thing we are doing now: digitizing one shelf at a time. Still, to Barbara Thiers, Ph.D., we say: we admire your tenacity!

Here's the link for all interested parties: The New York Botanical Garden: The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium | THIRTEEN - New York Public Media

Fun with STEM and Sad Farewells

Two weeks ago, we set a series of goals, and so my first duty in this entry is to report the results. Happily, we exceeded our weekly image goal by photographing 3, 774 specimens; however, due to some trouble with trouble-shooting (say that five times fast), we only barcoded 4, 428 specimens, leaving us 1, 571 barcodes short of our ambitious objective. This did not damper our enthusiasm, but instead fueled it.

 

Last week digitization slowed, but not for lack of fervor. It was for a good cause, I promise. Dr. Monfils, Sascha, and I volunteered to lead a two-day workshop for STEM, a science and engineering summer camp that aims to get sixth grade girls involved in math and science. The first day, Dr. Monfils gave a fun and brilliant presentation on mitigated wetlands and natural history collections, while Sascha and I set up wetland specimens from the Herbarium in the other room. We designed an informational plant identification worksheet, and after Dr. Monfil’s presentation, the children were able to examine the labeled specimens and learn fun facts about them (For example, did you know that Horsetails, aka scouring rushes, can be used to clean musical instruments?). While the kids were thus occupied, Sascha and I placed the same species in another room, but with the labels covered.

A mitigated wetland at Chippewa Nature Center in Midland, MI

After they were done learning about the plants, the children could choose to enter the room and try to accurately identify the “mystery” plants by morphology alone. When they got every plant right on the Plant Identification Challenge, candy rained figuratively down upon the victors. The second day, we, along with some CMU BUMP scholar volunteers, took the children on a scavenger hunt at the Chippewa Nature Center in Midland, MI. There they got to see a real mitigated wetland, and tried to find all of the plants, animals, and engineering structures on a worksheet Sascha and I made.
 

Sascha, myself, and CMU BUMP Scholar volunteers

 

I have to say that working with these kids was a true pleasure. They were some of the most curious, perspicacious, and enthusiastic sixth graders that I have ever met. They were eager to answer questions, and on the scavenger hunt they were tripping over each other to point out the plants that they had learned the day before. It was great to get these kids excited about science and nature, and it was all the more satisfying to know that our Herbarium specimens were involved in garnering that excitement.
 

The kids were very excited to learn the difference between broad-leaved (Typha latifolia) and narrow-leaved (Typha angustifolia) cattails

  

The Waterlilies were the first plants the kids recognized


Last Thursday, Sascha left us to undertake a whole new series of adventures while she studies abroad in London. She shall be missed desperately, and digitization will be slower now that I am doing it on my own. However, despite last week’s felicitous detour, Sascha and I accomplished much before she left. This morning, I began photographing cabinet fifteen (out of twenty cabinets), and we have now digitized 13, 857 specimens!

 

Sascha, sad to be leaving us! By the way, I will suffer her wrath for posting this picture.

 

Although the end is nigh, setting goals is still important. Thus, my goals for this week are 1,500 photos and the completion of all barcodes through cabinet twenty.

Until next time, I shall be here bright-eyed and bushy tailed,

Abigail H.

Summer Digitization Begins

Last week I returned from my three week Botany course on Beaver Island, MI. I am certain that my Botany class will help me make more mental connections as I help work through the cabinets for the final time. I must say, however, that my year working in the CMC Herbarium really helped me when it came to memorizing many of the scientific names for my class. One cannot help but become familiar with scientific names when one has handled and relabeled almost 29,000 individual specimens.  I have also already benefitted from our Herbarium’s APG III organization. Because I helped rearrange them, I already knew that bryophytes evolved prior to seedless vascular plants, and that gymnosperms evolved before the monocots and eudicots. Many of the crazy Latin names seemed like old familiar friends, rather than estranged relatives one is meeting for the first time.

Sascha leaves in less than a month to study abroad, and so we are pushing as much as we can in order to finish barcoding and digitizing the entire collection. We’ve discussed with Dr. Monfils the importance of setting up a system of short-term and long-term goals and rewards, so that this process does not take on the persona of a plodding, insurmountable task. Thus, we have a board on which we display our all-time daily records for both barcoding and digitizing. So far, the count stands at 1, 576 barcodes and over 1,500 photos in one day. On some glorious day, we hope to reach 2,000 photos.

Sascha begins barcoding in the morning with joy in her heart.

Sascha by the end of the day.

 

 What is most challenging about digitization is that it is repetitive and seemingly mindless…and yet it isn’t. We must still be vigilant, checking as we go for the little details on each specimen: accession numbers, folder organization, annotation accuracy, etc. We also have to try to keep track of barcode numbers, so that we don’t miss photographing or batching out any specimens. This work can be tedious, so to keep us motivated, Dr. Monfils has provided us with copious amounts of candy (beneficial for our mental sanity but not necessarily for our waistlines). We have also found that books on tape actually help keep us more focused, and prevent our eyes from glazing over after seven-plus hours of the same task. We take occasional stretch breaks, and Sascha and I make sure to take turns photographing and barcoding, lest we are driven mad by the job and are forced to become nomadic hermits on some misty Middle Earth mountain. Luckily, I became eccentric long before I began my work in the CMC Herbarium, and so I think I am less at risk than Sascha.

 So much candy! How to decide which to take?

 Maybe I'll just take them all...

We have twenty cabinets total, and last week, we made great progress. We barcoded five and a half cabinets of specimens and photographed three. If we keep going at this rate, we believe that we can finish barcoding the whole collection by the time Sascha leaves. We also hope to be at least half-way through digitizing the collection at that point. So, those are our longer-term goals…the longest being that the whole collection needs to be digitized by the end of the summer in August.

Our short-term goals for this week are as follows:

1)      Get through at least 6,000 barcodes

2)      Photograph at least 3,500 specimens (~700 a day over a five day work week)

We believe that these goals will drive us harder, but are also realistic to achieve. Posting them here also makes us accountable. So, we are depending on all of our blog followers to keep us on our toes!

Vigilance!

Abigail H.