@article {760,
	title = {Poster: Improving the Character of Optical Recognition (OCR)},
	year = {2012},
	abstract = {There are an estimated 2 {\textendash} 3 billion museum specimens world {\textendash} wide (OECD 1999, Ari{\~n}o 2010). In an effort to increase the research value of their collections, institutions across the U. S. have been seeking new ways to cost effectively transcribe the label information associated with these specimen collections. Current digitization methods are still relatively slow, labor-intensive, and therefore expensive. New methods, such as optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing, and human-in-the-loop assisted parsing are being explored to reduce these costs. The National Science Foundation (NSF), through the Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, funded Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) in 2011 to create a Home Uniting Biodiversity Collections (HUB) cyberinfrastructure to aggregate and collectively integrate specimen data and find ways to digitize specimen data faithfully and faster and disseminate the knowledge of how to achieve this. The iDigBio Augmenting OCR Working Group is part of this national effort. - speed up the overall digitization process, - lower the cost, - improve overall efficiency, - assure digitized data is fit-for-use (NIBA 2010, Chapman 2005), and - provide the resulting digitized data records to researchers more quickly. The iDigBio Augmenting OCR (A-OCR) working group is actively engaged in identifying opportunities for collaboration to leverage OCR tools and technologies that are successful (both within and outside of the biology digitization domain) and disseminate these tools to the public or seek funding for development.},
	keywords = {education, machine language, Natural Language Processing, NLP, optical character recognition, Outreach, poster},
	url = {https://www.idigbio.org/sites/default/files/poster-files/ocr_dpaulposter.pdf},
	author = {Robert Anglin and Jason Best and Renato Figueiredo and Edward Gilbert and Nathan Gnanasambandam and Stephen Gottschalk and Elspeth Haston and P. Bryan Heidorn and Daryl Lafferty and Peter Lang and Gil Nelson and Deborah L. Paul and William Ulate and Kimberly Watson and Qianjin Zhang}
}
@article {1410,
	title = {SPNHC 2014 DemoCamp: Crowdsourcing in LBCC using Symbiota},
	year = {2014},
	abstract = {    The project {\textquoteleft}Lichens Bryophytes and Climate Change (LBCC){\textquoteright} is funded by the NSF-Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) Thematic Collections Network (TCN) program and aims to digitize ca. 2.3 million North American lichen and bryophyte specimens from over 60 collections representing well over 90\% of the remaining North American specimens from Canada, the United States and Mexico. In its third year of digitizing > 1.2 million lichen records are available at http://lichenportal.org  and > 1.8 million bryophyte records at http://bryophyteportal.org. Digitization involved imaging the specimen labels and uploading them into the open source online collections management system {\textquoteleft}Symbiota{\textquoteright} (http://symbiota.org)  where they become immediately available for transcription. The project was able to expand the already very sophisticated editing interface in Symbiota and developed functionality for citizen science to access the data. Employing the Drupal content management system, we developed simple querying tools in which volunteers can find specimens collected in a geographic area or taxonomic group of interest. The query utilizes information gathered from the label images via optical character recognition, presents the user with a set of records and forwards him/her to an abridged Symbiota screen for editing. In contrast to other citizen science interfaces that accomplish this task of transcribing information from an image, this approach allows the data to remain within the overall management framework, become available immediately, and do not have to be pulled out of the database and reintegrated later. This provides for seamless collaboration between volunteers, imagers, collections managers, and anyone interested in the data for research. In addition, this approach can take advantage of sophisticated quality control mechanism and search for duplicates already built into Symbiota, while not overwhelming the citizen scientist with the entire complexity of this system. The Drupal site allows for social networking among the volunteers and with the collections managers, plus posting of help specific for lichen and bryophyte labels.
    We will be demonstrating the functionality of the volunteer interface which can be access from http://lbcc.lichenportal.org and http://lbcc.bryophyteportal.org, as well as Symbiota{\textquoteright}s editing interface.
},
	keywords = {Citizen Science, crowdsourcing, Lichens Bryophyte and Climate Change (LBCC), OCR, optical character recognition, seamless integration, social networking, SPNHC 2014 DemoCamp, Symbiota, User Interface},
	author = {Barbara Thiers and Edward Gilbert and Corinna Gries and Benjamin Brandt}
}
