SAES-422 Multistate Research Activity Accomplishments Report

Sections

Basic Information
Additional Info

Status: Approved

Basic Information

Project No. and Title: WDC12 : Integrating Access to Information from Herbaria
Period Covered: 10/01/2008 to 09/30/2009
Date of Report: 08/31/2009
Annual Meeting Dates: 07/26/2009 to 07/26/2009

Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Legacy attachment file:

[Minutes]

1. Approval of the formation of a five year coordinating committee. This will enable the project to build on the momentum developed to date. 2. Expansion of the initial organizing committee to include three individuals with knowledge and experience in relevant areas of information technology as well as herbaria. These individuals are providing the organizing committee with valuable insights. 3. Identification of two contacts for each of the regional networks, including networks still in development. This has encouraged formalization of some networks and facilitates sharing information with all the networks and, through the networks, to individual herbaria. 4. Increased interaction with the National Biodiversity Information Infrastructure program which manages the US node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Close interaction with NBII is important because an important aspect of USVH is making herbarium records available. At the same time, NBII can also help publicize many of the other resources, including checklists, government reports, and online keys, to which botanists frequently contribute. 5. Organized presentations for the annual meeting that addressed questions concerning imaging and use of OCR technology that were raised at the 2008 meeting. 6. Initiated development of a proposal for NSF funding of a workshop to create a detailed estimate of the procedures, needs, and costs of creating USVH. Formed an advisory group to aid in the preparation of this proposal. The USVH project is built on, and contributes to, a growing interest on the part of herbarium curators in making their collections available via the Internet and growing recognition on the part of professionals in many disciplines, including those who advise policy makers, of the value of the information that can be derived from herbarium specimens. Consequently, credit for some of the impacts described above is shared with others, and with individuals who have been working to develop regional networks since before the project began. Nevertheless, several individuals attending the three-day annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America, which followed the USVH annual meeting, complimented the USVH organizing committee on their work and stated that they now felt optimistic about developing a national network in the near future. In some instances, they commented that what they had learned at the annual meeting and through discussions on herbaria had helped them in moving digitization of their own collection forward.

Impacts

Sponsorship by WAAESD has led an increase in contact between herbarium curators and Agricultural Experiment Station Directors, particularly in the many states where there is no direct connection between the Agricultural Experiment Station and herbaria. This has expanded recognition of the potential value of herbaria to agriculture.
The USVH project has drawn attention to the wide range of herbaria in the country and helped encourage inclusion of all herbaria in the national network, including the small herbaria at regional colleges. This in turn will encourage their students to view their efforts as an integral part of a national and global effort, rather than a local initiative.
The discussions at the annual meeting have helped disseminate information about new and effective approaches to imaging and databasing and identify some that are not as effective as was anticipated. They have also helped clarify additional developments that will increase the efficiency of herbarium operations, including both digitization of past collections and accessioning of new collections.
Initiation of a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a workshop, to be held in late January or early February, for development of a plan for creating USVH, including an assessment of the cost involved of doing so and of not doing so.
A significant change that benefits the project is that, for 2009, the Biological Research Collections Panel of the National Science Foundation explicitly encouraged development of collections networks, setting a maximum of $2,000,000 for such proposals rather than the $500,000 allowed individual collections. An informal count suggests that herbaria have been involved in at least 15 different submissions to the panel. Although most will not be funded, preparation of the proposals has undoubtedly helped the herbaria involved identify their needs and possibly areas in which they can make some small steps towards their goal without additional funding. This is something that impacts the USVH project rather than the other way around.

Publications

None

Back