From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.
The U.S. National Herbarium is starting off 2018 having reached a new milestone. Half of the approximately 5 million specimens housed in the herbarium now have a digital record, with more than 2.5 million specimens databased (1.3 million are also imaged). These digital records are all available for searching and exploring on the Department of Botany’s online specimen catalog.
With more and more families joining the ranks of “completely digitized”, the herbarium is regularly updating its Inventoried Plant Groups list on the Department of Botany website. If you have a question about whether a group has been inventoried, please visit the site, or contact Laura Tancredi.
In October 2017, the Information Management Team resumed use of the conveyor belt to digitize specimens from select plant families. In the last quarter of 2017, the team completed the imaging of the following families: Lamiaceae, Solanaceae, and all eight families between Campanulaceae and Asteraceae. In the coming months, the conveyor belt team will be imaging Acanthaceae, the Boraginaceae group, Melastomataceae, and Ericaceae. If any researchers plan to work in these families between now and March 2017, please contact Sylvia Orli.
Digitization work also continues through the Smithsonian Transcription Center. After 3.5 years and over 70 crowdsourcing projects, the Euphorbiaceae are now fully inventoried and transcribed. Interested volunteers are needed to continue the transcribing of specimens. Please visit the Smithsonian Transcription Center to view the herbarium’s current projects, Hippocastanoideae and Santalaceae.
The Grass Reorganization Project is in full swing. The Poaceae will be reorganized phylogenetically and each genus has now been assigned a genus number. The contractors are finishing up the re-foldering and annotating of subfamily Bambusoideae, and these pressed specimens will soon join the families mentioned above to be imaged by the conveyor belt team.
The grass reorganization team will continue processing the rest of the Poaceae in the coming year with completion of the project expected sometime in mid-2019. In the meantime, please expect some inconvenience while working in this family.
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