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.