The Plant Press

PBS Series Time Team America Visits NMNH

From Plant Press Vol. 15 no. 4

On August 14, a producer from Oregon Public Broadcasting came to the department to interview Greg McKee about the kind of work done in herbaria. This was in conjunction with a visit to the Department of Archaeology by students from the Time Team America program. This program takes local students of high school age and exposes them to the kind of work done at archaeological sites in the hope that it will generate future scientists. The focus of McKee’s interview was how a herbarium is used by researchers to identify and store plant specimens, and how a herbarium is built from collections and exchanges. Of particular interest to the producer were plants considered medicinal by the medieval doctrine of signatures, Pulmonaria lobaria (lungwort lichen) being one example.

The following day McKee gave two lectures to Time Team America students on the application of botany to archaeology. The lectures took place at the Needwood Mansion in Montgomery County, Maryland, where there is an active dig by state archaeologists researching early African-American culture. The focus of the talk was on artifacts constructed of plant material, such as vine or bark baskets, gourd containers and a child’s training blow gun from Ecuador. In addition to plant food sources and construction materials, soil structure and seed banks were discussed, as well as signs of disturbed soil (e.g., aerial photographs) and their interpretation were covered.

Staff Changes in Botany IT Group

From Plant Press Vol. 15 no. 4

Sylvia Orli has been selected for the new role as supervisor of the Botany Information Technology group, which provides digitization, imaging, specimen inventory and web support in the Department. She will be involved with coordinating Botany’s inventory program, soliciting input from staff to be used in establishing policy and goals (annual and long term) that are compatible with both museum-wide inventory objectives and Botany’s research and collections management activities, and providing overall direction to program. She will continue to develop web applications and she and along with the IT group will provide assistance to individuals designing and programming individual web applications and databases. One of her major areas of focus will be to initiate new projects and improve the overall function of existing ones in order to achieve compatibility between various research and image databases in the Department and the Museum so that common output programs and data exchange formats can be used. The group will also help with training in software and operating systems, and provide advice to staff in the selection and acquisition of hardware and software.

Orli has been at NMNH since 1993 and brings a broad range of experience to the position. After receiving her master’s degree from the University of Arizona, she initially took a position at NMNH in the Birds Division as a technician for the USFWS. During that first summer she and her supervisor surveyed Breeding Bird Survey routes. She continued to work for the USFWS but later joined the Division of Mammals as a research technician. In 1994 she was selected to work in Botany as a research assistant for Joan Nowicke and Stan Shetler focusing on pollen work with Nowicke and the DC herbarium/flora with Shetler. When Nowicke retired in 1999, Orli began working with Ellen Farr as an assistant webmaster. Her responsibilities in web development, database management, and herbarium curation increased significantly when both Farr and Shetler retired and moved to emeritus status.

Orli will represent one part of a new collaborative leadership team being developed in the Department’s collections inventory and digitization programs. The other two members will be Rusty Russell, who will focus on the coordination of activities related to developing, funding, and managing, digitization and biodiversity informatics projects, and the collections manager, who is currently being recruited. Together they will help develop, prioritize, and implement collections digitization initiatives, and insure that projects are fully developed from execution to completion using best practices from both collections and IT perspectives.

Ingrid Pol-Yin Lin has been selected for the position of Multimedia Technician. Lin has worked in Botany last for the past 10 years creating high quality digital images of the Type Collection, as well as images for several other important projects on grant funding. Lin’s new role as a full-time employee will expand to include a full range of multimedia activities: importation of multimedia in to the Museum Collections Management System (EMu), creation of new Multimedia records, management of the digital inventory records associated with the multimedia, exportation of EMu inventory and multimedia records, creation of reports, and management of our multimedia devices (e.g., cameras and light tables).

Awards & Grants

From Plant Press Vol. 15 no. 4

In August, Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti were appointed as members of the recently established Honorary Advisory Board of the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

During a September board meeting of the International Society for the History of Medicine (ISHM), Touwaide was reconfirmed as a Vice-President of ISHM.

EMu Reaches Milestone

From Plant Press Vol. 15 no. 4

The Department of Botany is pleased to announce that we have reached one million U.S. National Herbarium specimen records in our Museum Collections Database, EMu. This achievement reflects the hard work of almost 50 years of recording our specimen data in a digital format. Digitization efforts in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) began in late 1963. In the late 1960s, Botany began digitization with the Type Register, and continued digitizing specimens with a variety of approaches until the migration of our specimen data to EMu in 2002. Migration efforts continue to this day; we have about 400,000 more records to import to EMu in the next year. There are over 5 million herbarium specimens in the US Herbarium in total.

Digital specimen records and their specimen images (about 20 percent of our digital records have images) are used in a variety of ways by scientists and conservationists, and allow greater access to our collections while reducing the wear and tear on the physical specimens. Our online catalog can be found at http://collections.mnh.si.edu/search/botany/.