Herbarium@home is open to all. No specialist technical knowledge of botany or taxonomy is required. The aim of the project is to computerise the plant collections archived by museum and university herbaria; thereby making them available to a much wider audience. This is important work that will help make the collections accessible to researchers and the public.
Herbarium sheets are typically labeled with the name of the plant, the place it was collected from, collection date, and collector name. It also useful to record details of the people and institutions through which the specimen has passed (the provenance), as the specimens or collectors can be of intrinsic historical interest.
Because of the way sheets have been labeled, in principal it is easy to accurately create a computer record of the specimen, so the task does not require particular technical knowledge. In practice, reading the labels, which are often written in beautiful but scarcely decipherable handwriting, and recognizing the obscure locality or collector names takes some practice and experience, but it adds to the challenge and satisfaction of the task.
Try out and join
You can register, or if you want to try out documenting a sheet straight away then return to the home page and follow the link under 'My Sheets'.
It is well worth reading through the tutorial before you start.
