Meet the iDigBio Staff: An Interview with Gil Nelson
3 February 2012
Gil Nelson is iDigBio’s digitization specialist, with a focus on developing and improving digitization workflows and providing digitization support for the Thematic Collections Network projects. He is based at Florida State University. Here, Gil Nelson is interviewed by Austin Mast, a collaborator with Nelson on prior projects and a member of iDigBio’s Steering Committee.
The 2011 summit to kick-off the iDigBio project concluded on December 1st, 2011. By all accounts, this endeavor was a tremendous success, and enabled us to initiate a detailed dialog with representatives from the Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs) and other Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) projects. Participants provided user insight into ongoing activities, projected progress, and resources available to the community.
It is our pleasure to announce a new interface for the specimen databases of Florida State University's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium and Tall Timbers Research Station's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium. Both herbaria are named for Bob Godfrey (1911-2000), a respected expert on the flora of the southeastern U.S. The website serves data and images for approximately 60,000 of FSU's 206,000 specimens and nearly all of Tall Timbers' 10,500 specimens. These specimens document diversity in the East Gulf Coastal Plain ecoregion, one of North America's biotic hotspots, and also represent flora from other regions, especially the Neotropics. These databases can be accessed at http://herbarium.bio.fsu.edu. The new functionality allows new types of searches and results, including the following possibilities: (1) provide all specimens that were flowering in June in Leon County, Florida, irrespective of year, (2) map all specimens of invasive species collected in the past 10 years in Florida, and (3) provide only the desired set of fields about the specimens of interest in a tab-delimited file that can be opened in Excel or other spreadsheet programs. The search interface is also more convenient, with auto-fill of several fields (e.g., common name). The popular display of results as a page of thumbnails is now one of four available result formats.
The iDigBio team plans regular Blog and Wiki contributions that provide useful resources to TCNs and others who are in the process of imaging and databasing biological collections. The newest contributions, available now, include a blog post outlining important global issues and decision points to be resolved prior to initiating an imaging project, and three new glossaries that provide definitions of tools, projects and organizations, and terms important to the digitization effort. The glossaries are posted on the iDigBio wiki and are editable by registered users. Our intent is for the biological collections community to enhance these glossaries by making regular additions and contributions.
Imaging and databasing a biological collection seems like a straightforward task: procure the specimens, extract the data, take the image, and serve the image and data on the internet. However, in most cases there are numerous preliminary global issues and decision points to be resolved before actual imaging and data extraction can begin.
It is important to consider that iDigBio is one portion of a larger biological digitization community. The following links provide an overview of the larger Network Integrated Biological Alliance (NIBA), which includes iDigBio, Thematic Collection Networks (TCNs), and other digitizing institutions and strategic partners. In 2015 RCN changed NIBA's name to the "Biodiversity Collections Network" (BCoN).
Six months after receiving $10 million from the National Science Foundation to organize digitization of the nation’s biological collections, University of Florida researchers welcomed participants to Gainesville this week for the project’s kick-off symposium.
On any given evening, it is commonplace for the nightly news to refer to debt and spending amounts in the billions and trillions of dollars.
The use of these massive numbers is so ubiquitous that many of us have become numb to the true magnitude of what one billion objects represent.
Consider this: to count from one to one billion, one number per second, without breaks or sleep, would take you thirty one years!
