Building: Main Building 1st Floor
Room: Salone degli Oceani
Last modified: 2013-09-23
Abstract
Integrated Digitized Biodiversity Collections, iDigBio, is an exciting new resource for discovery of vouchered museum specimen data integrated from hundreds of museums across the United States (US). Over 150 US museums, organized in groups called Thematic Collection Networks (TCNs), are busy digitizing data from millions and millions of specimens in order to create a database of fit-for-research-use data suitable for addressing grand challenge questions. iDigBio and the TCNs are funded by the NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program. The ADBC is a collaboration between the Biological Sciences and Geosciences Directorates to fund the TCNs and iDigBio's hub to support the digitization activities and the online deployment of the integrated data at http://portal.idigbio.org. To address the costs, efficiency, and speed of digitization, iDigBio actively seeks to engage the broader community to work on discovering and disseminating best practices for current and future digitization efforts. iDigBio activities include sponsored workshops, conference participation, a community-derived wiki, and a website (http://www.idigbio.org). Our efforts focus on such topics as: addressing data standards, cyberinfrastructure development, digitization workflows, georeferencing, natural language processing (NLP), public participation, research using specimen data, education and outreach, and biodiversity informatics. iDigBio working groups welcome new members and we appreciate your input and suggestions for workshops, working groups, and our web site. Find out more at our poster session and at http://www.idigbio.org.