Suggestions and quries

[Natster]

Hi there,
I really appreciate what is being done here and think it will prove very useful but just have a few suggestions / queries. I appreciate i may not have a full understanding of the functions of this information, but hope my suggestions may increase the value of the herbarium to outside users.

I recently came across Hull Museum's website which has hundreds of herbarium specimens uploaded, which was very useful, but i gave suggestions for the search criteria being refined, much as yours are presented.

Suggestions / queries for herbaria@home are:

I would very much like to see a function added to be able to view the photos in more detail. Is this proposed?

Is the photogaphy method used to capture the herbaria specimens viable for examining specimens remotely? Or even to view plant structures on detail? I have scanned in various herbarium sheets for collagues and found they can zoom in to locate identification structures - i just hope the photography method can achive this too (one, would hope so with using such a good SLR).

To what effect have these herbarium sheets been determined? I assume it tells you on the sheet somewhere, but maybe this information would be useful in the search tables.

How are recent taxonomy changes to affect the data stored or search abilities of the data stored?

I look forward to your reply,
regards
Natalie

[Tom Humphrey]

Hi Natalie,

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

To view the sheet images in greater detail, open the specimen's pop-up info window (by clicking on the green cross next to the specimen in the search results). From there you can either open a higher-reolution JPEG image by clicking on the thumbnail image or to allow some image-viewer type functionality, you could edit the specimen (you need to be logged in to see that link). I'm not sure how much you've explored the site so far so this answer may have just be restated the obvious - if so please let me know what type of image viewing capability you would find useful. I agree that, as you suggest, it could useful to make available a more accessible and user-friendly way to view the images online.

Scanning sheets will almost certainly result in higher resolution images than are possible with most SLR digital cameras, but I think that in many cases the difference in quality is not so great as to be significant. For very many specimens sufficient detail is visible to allow diagnostic features of the specimen to be assessed. Where the image quality is not sufficient to conclusively assess a specimen then at least the online record and image alerts can alert you to the existence of interesting specimen that is worth investigating further.

The main reasons that I have not used a scanner are the additional time it takes to scan rather than photograph, and cost constraints. Specialist inverted scanners (where the scanner is mounted above the sheet so that the specimen is not damaged) are beyond the budget available to the project. It takes 10 to 15 seconds to position and photograph a specimen whereas in pilot tests scanning took a minute or more - this small difference becomes important when there are tens of thousands of sheets to digitize.

Where there is relevant determination information recorded on the sheet, then this is usually recorded and visible in the specimen summary window (e.g. this specimen). For many specimens there has not been a formal determination in recent times. Inevitably significant numbers of sheets will be listed incorrectly. I hope that over time many of these misidentifications will be corrected by expert users of the data - this is already happening to some extent.

I plan to revamp the way the search results are presented - which will probably include a way to pick which columns are displayed - this would allow the option for determination information to appear directly in the search results. I'm not quite sure when this will happen as there is a substantial backlog of work to do on the software but it is planned.

I have attempted to ensure that the site uses current names for taxa and internally there are dictionaries of obsolete names linked with their corresponding current name. Past and future name changes can be accommodated as multiple names can be associated with a specimen (a current name and a series of previous names). When names change in the future then it will be possible to update the taxon dictionary so that specimens are listed under the new name.

It should be possible to search using either current or obsolete names (I say 'should' because while testing this just now I found it was not working as expected - I need to investigate what has gone wrong).

regards,

Tom