By: Libby Ellwood, Heaven Wade, Matt von Konrat, Austin Mast, Robert Bruhn and Kevin Love
WeDigBio celebrated its eighth year! For four days, April 7-10, biodiversity data mobilization was kicked into high gear yet again! During the now bi-annual WeDigBio (Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections) event, members of the public contributed to almost 80,000 completed digitization tasks. For the most part, these were transcriptions of specimen labels though other tasks included annotations and classifications of information visible on specimen images. For the last several years we have partnered with SciStarter to advertise and promote events, alongside other projects that happen during Citizen Science Month each April.
This year, the partnership included increased involvement with libraries – a natural fit given that both natural history collections and libraries are invaluable resources for documenting life on Earth.To highlight the connection to libraries, we co-hosted a webinar featuring Darlene Cavalier (Professor of Practice at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and a Senior Global Futures Scientist in ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory; Founder, SciStarter), Martin Kalfato
vic (Associate Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Digital Programs and Initiatives; Program Director for Biodiversity Heritage Library) and Madeleine Thompson (Director of Library and Archives at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is based at the Bronx Zoo), and hosted by WeDigBio’s own Austin Mast. During this thought-provoking webinar, each speaker described alignment among the resources available from museum and living collections, libraries, and data collected by members of the community for documenting, understanding, and conserving biodiversity. You can watch the recorded webinar here: https://vimeo.com/698359151.
Participants joined transcription events hosted in the US from as far as Indonesia and Pakistan where it was late into the evening their local time! One participant from Indonesia described how WeDigBio provided not only an opportunity to help transcribe, but also interact and network with scientists from around the world! Similar to the last couple of years, we saw a mix of in-person, virtual, and hybrid events. Each was incredibly productive and by the looks of it everyone had a blast!
Event coordinators are getting more and more creative with sharing virtual tours of collections spaces and research talks. Perhaps this Whirlwind Tour of Florida’s Biggest Herbaria will inspire you to organize something similar among your collection and friends! You can watch the recording here: https://vimeo.com/698412033.
Events were being hosted all around the world from Australasia to Europe with volunteers participating globally starting with Aotearoa/New Zealand as the first to bring in the new day.
Don’t forget to bookmark this WeDigBio Transcription workflow written by Siobhan Leachman. In this incredible resource she details how she approaches not only data transcription but also enhancing these digital data with linkages to the collectors and other metadata. Read about it here!
We look forward to seeing you at our fall event, October 13-16 2022!
