Biological collections represent a significant national resource for research and applied biology, but these data are still widely unavailable in digital form. Development of a digital biodiversity information resource based on existing specimen data will provide an invaluable reference and baseline for future research activities. This award will organize and host two planning meetings that will bring together collections researchers and curators, natural history informatics specialists, and biological specimen imaging experts to develop and publish a 10-year strategic plan that will comprise a directed response toward meeting the data digitization challenge. The strategic planning project will identify issues relevant to the digitization of biological collections that will define the mission, scope, and magnitude of a program to address the capture and mobilization of specimen information, establish a community driven framework to develop, promote, revise, and distribute a strategic plan for biological collections digitization; and engage individuals from across diverse collections and institutions in the planning and implementation of a coordinated collections digitization initiative.
Knowledge of biodiversity, obtained through the use of collections, is critically important for studies of invasive species, biological conservation programs, land management strategies, biotic responses to climate change, the spread of pathogenic organisms, and research and management activities of many kinds. A coordinated effort to digitize existing biological collections and to mobilize the data and images in a freely available online will have major, positive impacts on U.S. scientific achievement and global scientific collaboration.
Biological collections, gathered over more than two centuries of research and exploration, represent a significant national resource for research and applied biology that has been underutilized in the digital realm. Capturing and mobilization this information in publicly accessible and research focused web-based databases is a major goal of for modernizing and applying the information in natural history collections. This project convened strategic planning meetings to organize and produce a national plan for digitization of information and objects housed in US biological collections. The project supported working group meetings, a writing team, and publication development, production and dissemination. Meetings included project leaders and key collections community participants. Coordination and launch of a National research and informatics initiative entitled The Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA) was completed. Development, dissemination, and publication of a Strategic Plan was completed, and an Implementation Plan was also advanced through collaboration with AIBS. The project has propelled community and institutional participation in the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) Program and in the National Biological Collections Digitization Hub (iDigBio). Meetings and workshops were designed to identify issues relevant to the digitization of biological collections that defined the mission, scope, and magnitude of a program to address the capture and mobilization of specimen information; and, to establish a community driven framework to promote, revise, and distribute a strategic plan for biological collections digitization. Researchers, museum specialists, and graduate students from across academic and research institutions participated in the planning and implementation of a coordinated collections digitization initiative. To achieve engagement and implementation, additional meetings focused on best practices in specimen digitization were held that included members of the original NIBA participants, the National Digitization Hub (iDigBio) research and admin teams and various academic and natural history collections.
