Critic's Choice Essay: Virtual Herbaria Come of Age
(First paragraph of article.) These are exciting times for natural history collections. An international effort is underway to make images and data of biological specimens available in electronic format via digitization. These initiatives are an effort to bring natural history collections out of the dark of museum and herbarium cabinets and into the light of public access for use by stakeholders in government, academia, biodiversity organizations, business, and K-12 education. The democratization of information contained in natural history collections through images and online databases is an important new development to better investigate our natural world and solve important social and environmental problems (Scoble 2010).
Increasing the efficiency of digitization workflows for herbarium specimens
Abstract The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium has been databasing and imaging its estimated 7.3 million plant specimens for the past 17 years. Due to the size of the collection, we have been selectively digitizing fundable subsets of specimens, making successive passes through the herbarium with each new grant. With this strategy, the average rate for databasing complete records has been 10 specimens per hour. With 1.3 million specimens databased, this effort has taken about 130,000 hours of staff time. At this rate, to complete the herbarium and digitize the remaining 6 million specimens, another 600,000 hours would be needed. Given the current biodiversity and economic crises, there is neither the time nor money to complete the collection at this rate. Through a combination of grants over the last few years, The New York Botanical Garden has been testing new protocols and tactics for increasing the rate of digitization through combinations of data collaboration, field book digitization, partial data entry and imaging, and optical character recognition (OCR) of specimen images. With the launch of the National Science Foundation’s new Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, we hope to move forward with larger, more efficient digitization projects, capturing data from larger portions of the herbarium at a fraction of the cost and time.
Recovery of descriptive information in images from digital libraries by means of EXIF metadata
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a study case of the digitization of documents kept by the Reino de Valencia Archive and its description and recovery through EXIF metadata from the digital images obtained. The control of digital images, in terms of identification of their number and the batches they belong to, can be achieved by naming the digital file with digits that the user can identify.Design/methodology/approach – The paper's objective is to provide image descriptions far better than by naming the file. For that reason the paper analyses the tools and results obtained with each one of them.Findings – Results about using commercial software for metadata image description.Originality/value – The paper describes a novel use of metadata for historical archives documents.