Workshop Opportunity: Leveraging Digitization Practices Across Multiple Domains

                                                                                           

iDigBio and the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity & Ecological Restoration (CCBER) at the University of California, Santa Barbara are pleased to announce Leveraging Digitization Practices across Multiple Domains, a natural history collections digitization workshop to be held 6-9 October 2014 in Santa Barbara. Those interested in attending should apply for participation at http://tinyrul.com/levdigiApplication deadline is 18 July 2014. The workshop is fully supported and open to curators, collections managers, directors, and other collections professionals in public non-federal natural history collections within the U.S. and its territories. iDigBio has funds to reimburse up to 40 participants for travel, lodging, and food. There is no registration fee. 
 

Workshop proceedings will be broadcast and recorded. All recordings and electronic copies of presentations will be posted to the workshop wiki: https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Leveraging_Digitization. Remote participation is invited. Please monitor the wiki for an upcoming link to the draft agenda.  

This event is part of a continuing series of iDigBio-sponsored workshops focused on organizing, launching, maintaining, and enhancing biological collections digitization programs. The primary goals are to 1) encourage sharing and collaboration of digitization strategies, practices, and techniques across all domains, and 2) provide the necessary skills and knowledge required to launch, manage, and sustain a biodiversity collections digitization program individually, through collaboration with an existing Thematic Collections Network (TCN), as a Partner with an Existing Network (PEN), through direct collaboration with iDigBio, or through collaboration with other collections and museums. The target audience includes collections managers, curators, directors, digitization specialists, biodiversity informatics managers, taxonomists, and others who manage or use biodiversity collections. 
 
This is a broad-based workshop of value to many types of biodiversity collections. The focus will be on digitization practices that are common or unique to a variety of preparations and collection types, including vascular and non-vascular plants, fungi, arthropods, and vertebrates, and will include ample time for rich discussion and interchange of ideas and practices.
 
Workshop content and discussion topics include but are not limited to: 1) an overview of Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), the National Science Foundation’s national resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections, 2) the future of NSF funding and other funding opportunities to support digitization programs, 3) issues in organizing and launching a collections digitization program, 4) the clusters of essential digitization tasks, 5) common and effective digitization workflows and protocols, 6) overviews, uses, and configurations of imaging systems for various collection types, 7) standards affecting database design and management, including issues in assigning unique identifiers to collection objects and records, 8) strategies for incorporating genomics into digitization, 9) uses for digitized data in research, 10) strategies and considerations for georeferencing collection objects, 11) uses of digitized data in research, 12) education, outreach, recruitment, and student involvement in digitization programs, 13) public participation, citizen science, and crowd-sourcing, and 14) methods for moving digitized data to the internet via data aggregators, harvesters, and portals, including how to contribute data to iDigBio’s data repository. 
 
What: Leveraging Digitization Practices across Multiple Domains.
Where: Loma Pelona, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Who: Collections managers, curators, directors, taxonomists, biodiversity informatics managers, and specialists in public non-federal collections in the U.S. who are interested in initiating, enhancing, or sustaining a biological collections digitization program.
When: 6-9 October, 2014 (the 6th and 9th are travel days). Opening reception, evening of 6 October, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
Planning Team: Jennifer Thorsch (UCSB), Laurie Hannah (UCSB), Mireia Beas-Moix (UCSB), Gil Nelson (iDigBio).
 
For further information, e-mail Gil Nelson at gnelson@bio.fsu.edu.
 
 
APPLICATION DUE DATE: 18 JULY 2014.