From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.
A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project is now available on YouTube where you can see the conveyor belt in action and hear about the workflows and processes that made the project such a success. After 6 years of digitizing the US National Herbarium, the digitization project is nearly complete. By January 2022, nearly 4 million catalog records of the herbarium’s botanical specimens will have been digitized, each with a high-resolution image. All flowering plants and ferns, lichens, bryophytes, and algae will be represented online (see the online collection portal).
The behind-the-scenes video was featured during the “Biodiversity Digitization: A Decade of Success” (Biodiversity Digitization 2021 | iDigBio) virtual conference. Co-sponsored by the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), iDigBio, and GBiF, the two-day conference held on September 22 and 23 celebrated the collective successes of mobilization and efforts to digitize the world’s biodiversity data in the US and abroad. Participation by NMNH staff in the conference included six speakers and four virtual tours of the museum’s collections. Over 800 attendees pre-registered for this event.
The virtual conference provided both detailed looks at specific work being done in digitization, as well as a broad outlook on the meaning and significance of digitized collections. The themes for the two-day conference were innovations, community, grand challenges, what’s next, and looking to the future of digitization.
Other behind-the-scenes tours featured at the conference include those of the Entomology Collection, Molluscs Collection, and Cultural Objects. Each video is part of NMNH’s “Natural History for Scientists” YouTube channel.
A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project features Sylvia Orli and Victor Shields (Picturae) with an introduction by Eric Schuettpelz.