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/.
Comments