A New Term and New Tasks

After I left for my study abroad trip in July, Abigail fulfilled our goal of digitizing the entire Herbarium collection. The long hours we put into completing that task and the number of books on tape we listened to while bar-coding are innumerable.

Now we have a new task, Foldering, and Abigail has gone and graduated, leaving me to complete this myself.

The process is simple: All of the specimens will be placed within two folders, one, a thick, protective folder that has a typed label stating the Family and Genus, the other a thin folder labeled with the species name.

This task is not nearly as slow as Digitization, a process which required the handling of each individual specimen in the collection, but for accuracy's sake the names in our completed database are being run through iPlantCollaborative.org and Tropicos.org again. This takes some time to do but is necessary to ensure that what species we have in the cabinets matches what species we have in the database, and to again verify the specimens' names.

Running the species names also sheds light on who named the species, information we want to include in the labels we print for the folders. 

With my graduation date coming up soon, my efforts in getting an informational poster and pamphlet for the Herbarium have doubled. The content of these needs to be edited and approved by Dr. Monfils by mid-October, after which I will work with a few departments on campus to get them formatted and printed before December.

I also have been given the honor of working closely with Hillary. Hillary is currently taking the Wetland Plants course with Dr. Monfils and helps Rachel with her research.
Hillary's plant identification skills are far superior to mine and her botanical knowledge has been extremely helpful over the past few weeks. Her keen understanding of plants assures me that I will be leaving the Herbarium in good hands.

Still, there are a few key tasks that are essential to the running of the Herbarium that I must show Hillary. We will be going, step by step, through the tasks that are important to processing incoming material. Along the way, we will be testing the accuracy and the clarity of the protocols that have been written for each of these steps.

The itinerary for Herbarium training:
Drying and Freezing, Mounting, Digitizing, Updating the Database, and Filing. 

Together we also have the goal of Foldering the entire collection by the end of the summer. 

We are geared up for quite a busy semester!

Peace. Love. Plants.
Sascha