1st Annual iDigBio Augumenting OCR Hackathon: Fort Worth, Texas, February 13-14
iDigBio Augmenting OCR Hackathon
February 13-14, 2013, in Fort Worth, Texas
Be a part of helping to get "dark data" out of millions of museum cabinets and into online databases!
New iDigBio Workshop Opportunity: Digitizing Specimens in Wet Collections, March 5–6, 2013
iDigBio is pleased to announce the second in a series of preparation-specific workshops focusing on organizing, launching, maintaining, and enhancing a biological collections digitization program. This new workshop will focus on digitization of wet collections, to include specimen label databasing, specimen imaging, ledger and field book imaging, and digitization of legacy objects such as X-rays, CT scans, and 35mm slides.
Florida Museum of Natural History Butterfly Fest 2012
Bruce MacFadden, iDigBio Director of Education and Outreach
Dr. Bruce MacFadden is Curator of Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and Director of Education and Outreach for iDigBio. His responsibilities with iDigBio include oversight of educational and outreach activities and their assessment at iDigBio, the TCNs and at other digitization projects involving biological collections. Here, he discusses his early fascination with dinosaurs and paleontology, pivotal experiences in undergraduate and graduate school that helped shape his career, and then some of his professional accomplishments.
Accelerating Scientific Discovery through Public Participation
A special iDigBio Blog Contribution by:
Austin Hendy, Ph.D.
Florida Museum of Natural History
Public Participation in Digitization of Biodiversity Specimens Workshop Report
iDigBio’s Public Participation in Digitization of Biodiversity Specimens Workshop was held on September 28-29 in Gainesville, FL.
Topics included the role of citizen science, ways to engage the public in digitization, methods to build public participant virtual communities, and an overview of biodiversity informatics software to facilitate public participation. Visit the workshop wiki page for links to the final agenda, the GoogleDoc, and the presentations.
2012 Year in Review
On 30 June 2012, iDigBio completed its first year of operation. As the national resource for the NSF-funded Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections(ADBC), our first year required that we identify and overcome major organizational hurdles as we develop a national infrastructure for the ADBC institutions. We are pleased to report that our first year was highly successful. In this article, we enumerate some of our major activities and accomplishments.
Paleocollections Digitization Workshop Report
Bruce MacFadden reports on the recent Paleocollections Digitization Workshop hosted by iDigBio and FLMNH. The workshop was held to assess the status and future of digitized collections within the paleontological community. Presentations, discussions and breakout sessions focused on three themes: 1) tools, datapases and portals, 2) digitization and workflows, and 3) research applications and Grand Challenges.
iDigBio Graduate Assistantship available in Vertebrate Paleoinformatics, starting Fall 2012
The NSF-funded iDigBio project is pleased to announce a graduate assistantship in vertebrate paleoinformatics in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology (VP) at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH), University of Florida (UF).