GUALA, GERALD F. Keeper of the Herbarium, Fairchild Tropical Garden Research Center, 11935 Old Cutler Rd., Miami, FL 33156 USA. - Lessons from the Virtual Herbarium.
The Fairchild Tropical Garden is building the first truly virtual
herbarium on the web at (www.ftg.fiu.edu). Unlike other herbaria that
may be putting up text-only databases or selections of type photos, we
are providing an integrated text database of ALL of our specimens with
a high resolution photo of the complete specimen and a high resolution
scan of the label. This allows researchers to gather distribution
data and check identifications on the WWW at a greatly reduced cost
and effort. It already contains more than 30,000 specimens including
all of our Cycad, Palm and Florida specimens and is expanding rapidly.
The resource has been built using a simple, efficient and streamlined
process that employs inexpensive and widely available hardware and
widely compatible software. We have also designed the software and
data entry protocol specifically for unskilled volunteer labor with
automatic error checking and constrained and very simple data entry
procedures. Specimens are geocoded by volunteers in remote localities
over the WWW and automatically checked for reasonable accuracy based
on independently entered data. Several key lessons have been learned
through the building of this resource and they will be shared with
audience. Highlights include error checking and avoidance, personnel
management, ghosts of botanists past, ghosts of herbarium workers
past, getting the data to the web, getting the data checked,
distributed data entry and error checking, protecting sensitive data
and geocoding on the web.
Key words: computerization, cyberbotany, database, digitization, herbarium, WWW