A 3-day meeting, digitization workshop, and best practices session will be held from 8 to 10 April 2011 for 36 curators of plant research collections (herbaria) throughout Texas and Oklahoma. This event will strengthen operational infrastructure within the TORCH (Texas Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria) collections network and will train herbarium curators in digitization methods and cybertechnologies. Three primary outcomes are anticipated from this event: 1) Enhancement of the organizational functionality of TORCH to coordinate digitization efforts among regional herbaria, 2) Hands-on learning among participating curators and students in biodiversity informatics tools, digitization techniques, and national initiatives involving data sharing and imaging of natural history collections, and 3) Development of best practice standards for the TORCH community. This workshop will prepare herbarium curators to collaborate and function as a regional node for national biological collections digitization initiatives.
Workshop attendance supported by travel stipends is a necessary incentive to ensure sufficient input from regional curators and graduate students, thus engendering maximum support for and commitment to future TORCH activities. Development of a collaborative management plan and work strategy for herbarium digitization and data mobilization is imperative so that TORCH may contribute to federal initiatives such as the U.S. Biological Collections Resource/ Network Integrated Collections Alliance. The planned digitization and sharing of data contained in the 3.5 million herbarium specimens in Texas and Oklahoma will increase substantially the synthetic value of these data for biologists, ecologists, resource managers, and policy makers at the national and international level.
A herbarium is a special museum of preserved plants that are labeled and identified and used for education and research. Herbaria across the globe provide a permanent record of the diversity of the Earth's flora, and by digitizing these collections, the resulting online data and images can be used by a vastly broader audience. This project had the overall goal of preparing herbarium curators, collection managers, and students in Texas and Oklahoma (TORCH, the Texas Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria) to collaborate and function as a regional node for national biological collections digitization initiatives. This grant was originally proposed to support a single workshop in 2011, but lower actual costs and two cost-free time extensions allowed the funding to be stretched to support three separate workshops over a four-year period. In the first year of the grant, a digitization workshop and best practices session was held 8-10 April 2011 at the Texas Tech Llano River Field Station in Junction, Texas. This grant supported the attendance of 40 people including curators and graduate students from herbaria throughout Texas and Oklahoma and invited speakers from other regional consortia. Twenty-five professional representatives from 20 TORCH herbaria attended. Six institutions represented at the meeting provided eight student participants. Invited speakers representing five regional herbarium consortia gave presentations and participated in a panel discussion on the discovery, selection, and documentation of best practices for digitizing herbaria. Presentations and a page of links to best practice recommendations and resources are preserved on the TORCH website at www.TORCHerbaria.org. The grant was extended with remaining funds to support a second workshop for curators and graduate students, this time training them in the use of the popular (and free) Specify 6 collections management software. The Specify workshop was held 17-19 May 2012, at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station at Lake Texoma. Andy Bentley of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute led the workshop for 18 participants, including seven graduate students (five masters and two doctoral). Participants represented 13 TORCH herbaria. Participants learned to use the software and were introduced to the concepts of collection objects and their relationships, collecting events, normalized data, and datasharing. The grant was extended a second time with remaining funds to provide travel support for curators and students to attend a workshop led by the NSF-supported national biocollections digitization hub, iDigBio. The workshop was held at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, on 24 May 2014, and was led by Deb Paul and Joanna McCaffrey. Twelve professional herbarium staff and four students (three undergraduate and one doctoral) from nine TORCH herbaria attended. The workshop focused on summarizing best practices for various stages of digitization workflows in herbaria, standards in data cleaning and management, and instruction on how individual herbaria become data providers to the iDigBio Portal. All presentations and discussions are recorded for posterity on the iDigBio TORCH workshop wiki (www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/TORCH_VIII_%2B_iDigBio_Workshop). The three workshops supported by this grant fulfilled the goals of the original proposal by enhancing TORCH functionality through facilitating digitization efforts of herbarium collections, providing experiential education in biodiversity informatics tools to participants, and providing participants further familiarity with best practices and standards. Beyond fulfillment of the original grant objectives, these workshops connected representatives of numerous smaller and somewhat isolated herbaria with organizations and resources across the country. A total of 31 professional representatives from 21 herbaria in Texas and Oklahoma participated in one or more of the workshops. TORCH is now better prepared to collaborate and function as a regional node and contribute to the effort to digitize and mobilize the scientific information associated with biological specimens held in U.S. research collections. Broader impacts of these workshops include the encouragement of student participants to seriously consider careers in biology, biocollections management, and biodiversity informatics. A total of 16 students from 12 herbaria benefited from this grant by participating in one or more of the workshops. The growth of initiatives in biocollections digitization that give us reasons to hold such workshops is encouraging TORCH curators, most of whom are also professors, to feel more positively about the future of their field and renew efforts to encourage students to pursue careers in botany. The previous two decades have witnessed orphaned collections, abandonment of collections-based research by students in favor of molecular studies, and an apparent decrease in both the study of plant systematics in the traditional sense as well as the funding for such activities. Yet even the graduate student attendees who are conducting systematic projects of their own made the connection at these workshops that increased digitization would change their field from an anachronistic museum-bound hermitage to a 21st-century rapid data-mining and synthesis network. This sea-change in perception of the quality of life of organismal biologists may be the biggest impact of collections digitization on the next generation of scientists.
