Herbaria@home project proposal

A proposal for a new approach to herbarium documentation

Herbaria@home could be a ground-breaking new approach to digitising and documenting the archives of the UK's herbaria. The project would open up the task of herbarium documentation to a wide pool of volunteers, by enabling the members of botanical societies and the general public to get directly involved in cataloging collections.

Participating herbaria would contribute high quality digital images of their specimens, which would be made available through the @home website to volunteers who would document them using an online form. This could allow thousands of individuals to become involved, most of whom would not otherwise feasibly have access to museum herbarium collections. Volunteers' contribution would be completely flexible and no onerous time commitment would be required. Quality control would be maintained using a combination of automated checks, redundancy, peer-review of documented sheets and expert over-sight. Data from the project would be rapidly made publicly available.

A few years ago a project of this type would not have been technically or economically feasible, but now with high quality and affordable digital cameras, low cost computer storage and the prevalence of broadband internet connections the situation has changed radically. It's envisaged that staff or volunteers in a herbarium could rapidly photograph specimens. The images would be transferred to the @home server and made available to website users to document. Documentation of the specimen, using an online form would typically involve transcribing details from the specimen label, but could potentially also include redetermining the specimen. A working prototype is online.

The benefits to participating herbaria are clear: if successful the project could change the rate of documentation by an order of magnitude. A project volunteer would have have the satisfaction of contributing to a major botanical project; would have privileged access to high-quality images of previously unavailable specimens and could work from home, at their own pace at any convenient time.