The New York Botanical Garden has been databasing and imaging its herbarium specimens for the past 15 years.  Because of the size of our collection, we have been picking through the herbarium for fundable subsets of specimens (digitizing type specimens, vascular plants of Eastern Brazil, orchids of the West Indies, etc.) and skipping others along the way, going through the same cabinets over and over with each new grant.  The average rate for databasing complete records has been about 10 per hour - with 1,300,000 specimens databased, that’s about 130,000 hours of staff time.  In order to complete the herbarium and digitize the remaining 6,000,000 specimens, another 600,000 hours would be needed.  Given the current biodiversity and economic crises, there is neither the time nor money to complete the collection at this rate.  Through a series of grants over the last few years, The New York Botanical Garden has been testing new protocols and tactics for increasing the rate of digitization through data collaboration, fieldbook digitization, partial data entry and imaging, optical character recognition, crowd sourcing and combinations of them all.  With these tests and the launch of the National Science Foundation’s new Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, we hope to move forward with larger, more efficient digitization projects, capturing larger portions of the herbarium at once, at ten times our old rates.