Registration for the 2013 meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections is now open. This meeting is being held June 17-22 on the campus of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota, home of the Museum of Geology.
iDigBio Augmenting OCR Working Group provides a detailed update on the recent Hackathon and presentations at iConference 2013, held in Forth Worth, TX, February 12-15.
Over the past 16 weeks, the aOCR wg has successfully orchestrated multiple initiatives intended to address some key issues on the working group's Wish List. Here, we briefly report on our recent Hackathon, held February 13-14, 2013 in Fort Worth, Texas, and on our "BioBlitz" at the iSchools iConference 2013, which was held February 12-15 in Forth Worth. We also discuss planned papers and new interactions resulting from these events.
The second annual iDigBio Summit was held on October 23-24, 2012, in Gainesville, Florida, and was completed with great success! The Summit promoted clarification of objectives, communication of progress towards achieving objectives, identification and discussion of challenges and opportunities, and collaboration among stakeholders.
February 13-14, 2013, in Fort Worth, Texas
Be a part of helping to get "dark data" out of millions of museum cabinets and into online databases!
UPDATE! See Hackathon Wiki: http://tinyurl.com/aocrhackathonwiki and Participate Remotely!
February 13-14, 2013, in Fort Worth, Texas
Be a part of helping to get "dark data" out of millions of museum cabinets and into online databases!
iDigBio is pleased to announce the second in a series of preparation-specific workshops focusing on organizing, launching, maintaining, and enhancing a biological collections digitization program. This new workshop will focus on digitization of wet collections, to include specimen label databasing, specimen imaging, ledger and field book imaging, and digitization of legacy objects such as X-rays, CT scans, and 35mm slides.
Dr. Bruce MacFadden is Curator of Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and Director of Education and Outreach for iDigBio. His responsibilities with iDigBio include oversight of educational and outreach activities and their assessment at iDigBio, the TCNs and at other digitization projects involving biological collections. Here, he discusses his early fascination with dinosaurs and paleontology, pivotal experiences in undergraduate and graduate school that helped shape his career, and then some of his professional accomplishments.
A special iDigBio Blog Contribution by:
Austin Hendy, Ph.D.
Florida Museum of Natural History
iDigBio’s Public Participation in Digitization of Biodiversity Specimens Workshop was held on September 28-29 in Gainesville, FL.
Topics included the role of citizen science, ways to engage the public in digitization, methods to build public participant virtual communities, and an overview of biodiversity informatics software to facilitate public participation. Visit the workshop wiki page for links to the final agenda, the GoogleDoc, and the presentations.
On 30 June 2012, iDigBio completed its first year of operation. As the national resource for the NSF-funded Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections(ADBC), our first year required that we identify and overcome major organizational hurdles as we develop a national infrastructure for the ADBC institutions. We are pleased to report that our first year was highly successful. In this article, we enumerate some of our major activities and accomplishments.
Bruce MacFadden reports on the recent Paleocollections Digitization Workshop hosted by iDigBio and FLMNH. The workshop was held to assess the status and future of digitized collections within the paleontological community. Presentations, discussions and breakout sessions focused on three themes: 1) tools, datapases and portals, 2) digitization and workflows, and 3) research applications and Grand Challenges.
