Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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iDigBio's Public Participation in Digitization Management System
Austin Mast, Elizabeth Ellwood, Robert Bruhn, Greg Riccardi

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-29 11:10 AM – 11:20 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-05

Abstract


Public engagement in scientific research is not new, but new web resources (e.g., the Zooniverse, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and USA National Phenology Network suites of projects) provide scientists with opportunities to engage the public in ways and at scales not previously possible.  At the same time, the public is increasingly provided with opportunities to learn how to do science and, in some cases, co-design and implement the experiments with scientist partners (e.g., with functionality at CitSci.org).  This is leading to a democratization of science, in which the public has a more direct role in doing research meaningful to them (e.g., determining floristic changes in a local natural area).

Many of the ecological and environmental citizen science projects focus on generating present-day occurrence data on populations, species, and communities.  Biodiversity research collections provide the opportunity to produce historical and present-day baseline data on distributions with which to compare the new observations.  However, information about many of the specimens in these collections (roughly 90% of a billion specimens in the U.S.) has yet to be digitized.  There are a growing number of online tools that engage the public to digitize this specimen data.  However, the ad hoc nature of negotiations to use the tools leaves a potential mismatch between the specimens queued for digitization on the sites and the specimens that individual members of the public are motivated to digitize, and the community is without a data management system that provides end-to-end functionality for digitization of the specimens.

iDigBio (www.idigbio.org; at University of Florida and Florida State University) is the central national resource for NSF's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Program (ADBC).  iDigBio hosted a workshop on Public Participation in Digitization of Biodiversity Specimens from Sept. 28–29, 2012.  It brought together a unique combination of expertise—specimen digitization managers from ADBC's thematic collections networks, biodiversity informatics software developers, citizen science coordinators, and members of iDigBio.  Out of this workshop emerged the idea of an iDigBio Public Participation in Digitization Management System, which would permit the creation of record sets with the iDigBio Portal, management of their digitization (e.g., transcription or georeferencing) using collaborating public participation tools (e.g., Notes from Nature or GeoLocate), advertisement of the projects to the public, and return of the new data to the data providers and others via the iDigBio Cloud.  This management system is primarily for the project managers who could be biodiversity informatics managers, members of the public with special interests (e.g., naturalist groups), researchers interested in generating a dataset, or others.  It will permit those managers to create digitization projects that target specimens most relevant to them, make the case for the significance of the activity to potential participants, monitor the progress of the digitization, and download the growing dataset.

Work has begun on the management system, and we will present the data model, example use cases, and user interface designs.