Imagine if the world’s herbarium specimens were accessible with a few clicks of a mouse; that they could be searched in many different ways and that you could easily reuse the data. The efficiency of traditional botanical research would improve and new forms of research would be enabled. Such access would also open these collections to new communities and improve the verifiability and repeatability of botany. This talk will present some of the initiatives in this direction and what is on the horizon.
Some of the elements required to achieve this are production workflows for imaging, label transcription and data curation. Portals and interfaces are required to disseminate these images and their data, and standards are needed to ensure interoperability. All of this facilitates the aggregation of data to make it findable and useable.
Key parts of an integrated infrastructure are persistent identifiers for unique entities, so called PIDs. We can use these PIDs to link data together unambiguously and persistently.
These PIDs are the glue that holds the system together. We are all familiar with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) on scientific papers, but publications are only one of the unique entities we need to identify. Others are specimens, people, scientific names, molecular sequence and geographic entities.
To make this function at an institutional level the collection management system is an indispensable infrastructure. Yet, many organizations find the available solutions insufficient. A common theme is the struggle with software maintenance and lifespan. Spreadsheets are unsuitable for maintaining and publishing herbarium data and yet they are still widely used. Furthermore, a dedicated, trained, IT literate staff are required to maintain collection management systems.
At a global level the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) are critical. These organizations work with the botanical community to develop standards, methods and tools to improve the quality of specimen data. They also train biodiversity informatics to curators and scientists internationally.
To build systems suitable to realise the dream of a globally integrated herbarium access system does not just require technical development, but also a shared desire among the botanical community and long-term structural planning, independent of short-term research goals. Yet the potential to revolutionize botanical research in the 21st century should inspire us to work towards this goal.