Skip to content

Introduction "Born Digital" Natural History

Jump to bottom
Jacob Motley edited this page Aug 25, 2019 · 1 revision

Introduction - “Born Digital” Natural History

TODO image for fig 1

Fig. 1: A data rich specimen label from the Indiana University Herbarium (catalog number: IND-0006820).

Digitized natural history collections provide millions of biodiversity records to online public portals such as GBIF [1], iDigBio [2], and SERNEC [3]. These datasets are important resources for researchers and decision makers, but keeping them up-to-date is an ongoing challenge. Much of the data associated with natural history records is initially stored as text on a specimen label (Fig. 1) which need to be transcribed for use in online portals.

collNotes and collBook have been developed to accomodate collecting “born digital” _Fungi _and _Plantae _ records, which are initially gathered in digital formats suitable for online portals. To achieve this, collNotes, a mobile application, was developed to supplement the traditional field journal. A companion desktop application, collBook, enables users to refine field notes into print ready lables and portal ready comma separated value (CSV) files. Both programs have been released as open source projects [4], [5], in hopes that continued feedback and contributions from the community will improve the tools. For a more detailed overview of collNotes & collBook, see the associated publication.

  1. Global Biodiversity Information Facility: https://www.gbif.org
  2. Integrated Digitized Biocollections: https://www.idigbio.org/portal
  3. SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections: http://sernecportal.org/portal
  4. collBook’s primary repository: https://github.com/CapPow/collBook
  5. collNote’s primary repository: https://github.com/j-h-m/collNotes

Clone this wiki locally