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Abstract Detail


Systematics Section/ASPT

Metzgar, Jordan [1], Druckenmiller, Patrick [2], McDonald, Dusty [3], Ickert-Bond, Stefanie M. [4].

Specimen imaging and databasing efforts of botanical and paleontological collections at the University of Alaska Museum.

The University of Alaska Museum Herbarium (ALA) has recently imaged its vascular plant collection, with over 163,000 specimens having high-resolution images available online through the multi-institution, multi-collection database, Arctos. Over half of these have full label and georeferencing data available online and an optical character recognition protocol is being implemented to generate label data for the remaining specimen labels. Cryptogam label data are also being imaged and databased as part of a nationwide Thematic Collections Network (TCN) project under NSF's ADBC program. The Earth Science Collection at the University of Alaska Museum (UAMES) has recently implemented a parallel, NSF-funded project to digitize its vertebrate paleontology collection. New and innovative workflows and automated processing enable large numbers of specimens and related data to be rapidly imaged and databased. As part of this effort, the scaling relationship between the number of specimens and photographs has expanded from one specimen with one photograph (e.g., most herbarium specimens with one sheet) to one specimen with multiple photographs (e.g, many three dimensional paleontological specimens). Specimen data are also linked to images of accession and collecting event data, all of which may be viewed from various places within Arctos. All data are stored in Arctos at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) on a shared 5 petabyte disk storage system. To ensure data security, incremental and full backups are mirrored to the Ranch tape storage facility at TACC and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Data are publicly available through Arctos in HTML and RDF format, and are widely indexed through various search engines. These digitization methods developed at UAM will be applied to other portions of the Earth Science Collection, including its paleobotanical material, and have broader applicability to databasing efforts of natural history collections spanning a wide taxonomic spectrum.

Broader Impacts:


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1 - University Of Alaska Fairbanks, Museum Of The North, 907 Yukon Drive, Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA
2 - University of Alaska Museum and Department of Geology and Geophysics,, 907 Yukon Dr, Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA
3 - University of Alaska Museum, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 907 Yukon Dr, Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA
4 - University Of Alaska Museum Of The North, Herbarium (ALA) And Dept. Of Biology And Wildlife, University Of Alaska Fairbanks, 907 Yukon Dr., Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA

Keywords:
herbarium
imaging
specimen imaging
on-line database
databases
collection management
data management
optical character recognition.

Presentation Type: Poster:Posters for Sections
Session: P
Location: Battelle South/Convention Center
Date: Monday, July 9th, 2012
Time: 5:30 PM
Number: PSY041
Abstract ID:533


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