The Biospex project (http://biospex.org) provides tools for the management of digitization projects that utilize public participation for transcription, geolocation and other activities. Biospex is part of the larger iDigBio project that supports collection digitization as part of the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) project. ADBC seeks to create a national resource of digital data documenting existing biological collections and to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information (including images) residing in vouchered scientific collections across the United States.

Biospex digitization is based on pre-configured workflows that determine what tools will be applied for digitization. Workflow components include Notes From Nature (http://www.notesfromnature.org) for label transcription, GEOLocate (http://www.museum.tulane.edu/geolocate) for georeferencing and tools for evaluating consensus.

Biospex is based on existing standards and techniques. It uses Darwin Core Archive files for acquiring data from data providers, including images presented using the Audubon Core terms (http://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/Audubon_Core_Term_List). Digitization results are made available to providers and consumers of data through the Filtered Push annotation repository and distribution system (http://wiki.filteredpush.org).

This talk will demonstrate the use of the Biospex tools for acquiring images to be processed, describing project goals and activities, specifying digitization goals, dividing project data into groups (called "expeditions") for digitization, and monitoring progress of digitization. Another talk in the "Citizen science: a growing approach to biodiversity monitoring" symposium will discuss how the Biospex design enables "co-created" citizen science, rather than just the simpler "contributory" citizen science (sometimes called "crowdsourcing"), leading to a deeper public understanding of the scientific process.

This work is partially funded by grant from the National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Program (Cooperative Agreement EF-1115210).