This Small Grant for Exploratory Research proposes to develop innovative data acquisition protocols for information associated plant biodiversity voucher collections. The conceptual innovation of the proposed work is the separation of the process of specimen data acquisition from the processes of keystroke data entry. Acquisition of data will be accomplished by imaging plant specimens, in situ, within the collection galleries. The images will then be communicated over the Internet to a remote data entry contractor where the scientific data within the image will be converted to structured data records and then returned via the Internet to the collection. This data acquisition protocol development project is significant for two reasons: 1) There are an estimated 60+ million plant specimens in research collections in the U.S. alone. Each specimen includes historical distribution data on the world's flora and data from only an estimated 2% of the specimens in U.S. collections have been captured in automated systems. This information stored in museum cabinets is the result of 300 years of biodiversity inventories on the planet and represents a monumental human and financial investment in the US biological infrastructure. 2) The project is critically examining the scientific and management components of data entry protocols, with the primary objective of minimizing cost. The largest impediment to bringing the data archived on the labels of 60 million plant specimens into currency is the scale of the challenge. This project will examine several work protocol variations to attempt to find efficient and economically scalable techniques that could be implemented generically across the collections community for the rapid development of computerized indexes of the holdings of biodiversity research institutions. The results of this work will likely contribute significantly to the National Biological Infrastructure (NBII) by producing tools, protocols and standards for rapid data entry from biological collections.
