| Abstract Detail
Biodiversity Informatics & Herbarium Digitization Ackerfield, Jennifer [1], Yousse, Margo [2]. Easing the Transfer of Knowledge: A Herbarium Processing Toolkit. Smaller herbaria (ca. 100,000 specimens or less) often struggle to develop and implement best practices or protocols for processing specimens because of a lack of available resources and time constraints. This can delay specimen processing, creating a backlog of specimens. This additionally delays the associated data with specimens being made available to researchers. Denver Botanic Gardens has a smaller plant herbarium, consisting of approximately 75,000 specimens. However, while the herbarium itself is on the smaller side, there are considerable staff resources at the Gardens that are not available to many herbaria of similar size, particularly those at universities where curatorial responsibilities are coupled with teaching and development/implementation of research programs. Therefore, to aid other smaller herbaria in their specimen processing, Denver Botanic Gardens is developing a herbarium processing “toolkit.” This toolkit will aid herbaria in processing specimens and making the associated label data available on biodiversity portals such as iDigBio, GBIF, and SEINet. As part of the toolkit, videos, workflows, and protocols detailing each processing step will be made available to facilitate best practice implementation. The goal of this resource is to increase the quality of incoming specimens by providing context for each step in the process, even explaining the nuances of how each step needs to be done. By pulling from the wide-ranging experience and expertise of our staff and distilling it down into this toolkit, we can easily train new staff and volunteers as well as protect and share the valuable wisdom of our team. We plan to expand our library to include Spanish versions all training materials and to disseminate the toolkit online to ensure it is freely accessible to anyone. The resulting toolkit will enable anyone curating a smaller herbarium to process specimens in a timely, effective manner.
1 - Denver Botanic Gardens, 909 York Street, Denver, CO, 80206, USA
2 - Denver Botanic Gardens, 909 York St., Denver, Colorado, 80206, United States
Keywords:
Collections management
Specimen processing
Herbarium.
Presentation Type: Poster
Number: PBI001
Abstract ID:148
Candidate for Awards:None |
