Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

To measure achievement during 2016, the number of records in each US-based herbarium network contributed by US herbaria was determined to the extent the information was available. At the time, the Pacific Island network was offline because of a security problem. Some of the numbers are negative because, in 2016 but not 2015, only data from US herbaria were included.  This means that the figures for most networks underestimate the gains made. The problem is particularly acute for the fungal, bryophyte, and lichen networks, which include many non-US herbaria, but it also affects the data for the Pacific Northwest and Northeast, both of which include Canadian herbaria.

Another problem is that some herbaria, particularly the large institutions (those with over a million specimens) provide all their records to iDigBio and subsets to one of more of the various herbarium networks. To obtain a count of herbarium records in iDigBio is very difficult because an individual herbarium may, or may not, provide records of different kinds of organisms (e.g., fungi and plants) as different collections. To retrieve all the records of the different kinds of organisms housed in herbarium is also difficult. Moreover, many herbaria are not, as yet, providing their digitized records to iDigbio. The reasons vary from not knowing how to wishing to check their identifications before doing so.

The status of digitization in US herbaria in July 2016 is summarized below.

• Number of collections contributing to a US-based herbarium network: 574
• Number of US herbaria contributing to a US-based herbarium network: 371, somewhat more than half the US herbaria (many herbaria include fungi, algae, lichens, and vascular plants - each goes to a separate network; collections counts contribution to each network)
• Number of herbarium records in US-based herbarium networks: 21,685,093 (some may consist just of an image, some of an image plus minimal informatin, some all information on specimen but no image, some all information plus image.
• Number of herbarium records with latitude and longitude data in US-based herbarium networks: 8,138,176
• Number of imaged specimens or specimen labels in uS-based herbarium network: 9,962,412

Equally pleasing, all states had at least one herbarium engaged in digitization; most had more than one.  This means that sharing specimen data is becoming an integral part of running a herbarium. 

The project has not tracked publications about digitization nor publications that use digitized data, nor did it prepare any publications furing the past year.