Over the past 16 weeks, the aOCR wg has successfully orchestrated multiple initiatives intended to address some key issues on the working group's Wish List. Here, we briefly report on our recent Hackathon, held February 13-14, 2013 in Fort Worth, Texas, and on our "BioBlitz" at the iSchools iConference 2013, which was held February 12-15 in Forth Worth. We also discuss planned papers and new interactions resulting from these events.
The second annual iDigBio Summit was held on October 23-24, 2012, in Gainesville, Florida, and was completed with great success! The Summit promoted clarification of objectives, communication of progress towards achieving objectives, identification and discussion of challenges and opportunities, and collaboration among stakeholders.
The AOCR Working Group (AOCR wg) is going to iConference2013 February 12 - 15. In 4 different sessions the AOCR wg has put together a workshop, a poster, a short paper, and an alternative event on Februray 15th to report back to iConference folks on the 1st iDigBio - BRIT hackathon February 13-14 at BRIT.
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!
UPDATE! See Hackathon Wiki: http://tinyurl.com/aocrhackathonwiki and Participate Remotely!
UPDATE! See Hackathon Wiki: http://tinyurl.com/aocrhackathonwiki and Participate Remotely!
UPDATE! See iConference2013 iDigBio AOCR Wiki February 12 - 15, 2013
SPNHC 2013 DemoCamp: Call for Demonstrations
The 2013 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Annual Conference is October 27 - November 1, 2013 at the Grand Hotel Mediterraneo, Florence, Italy. The conference theme is "Virtual Communities for Biodiversity Science."
UPDATE: TDWG "Virtual Communities" Conference individual abstracts for each presentation online now. And, see the overview of each Symposia and Workshop.
Larry Page, Pam Soltis, Bruce MacFadden, and Joanna McCaffrey are collaborating to plan a two-part symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History collections. The first half of the symposium will describe the iDigBio program, NIBA, and ADBC. The second half of the symposium will feature presentations by invited speakers who use natural history specimens to study topics such as climate change or other complex biodiversity questions. The symposium is co-sponsored with NSCA.
iDigBio will be sponsoring three symposia at the Botany 2013 Meeting to be held on July 27-31, 2013 in New Orleans:
There will be a symposium and workshop on museum collection digitization efforts at the 2013 meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists (ASB). The emphasis will be on workflow options and workflow efficiency. The symposium will provide exposure to digitization efforts and challenges across taxonomic groups while the workshop will be a one-day training session on workflow concepts and logistics. The ASB Meeting is being hosted by Marshall University and will be held at the Charleston Civic Center in Charleston West Virginia on April 10-13, 2013.
This workshop will focus on digitization of dried insect specimens, stored in drawers and trays, either pinned or in packets. A sampling of workshop topics includes specimen label databasing, specimen imaging, ledger and field book databasing and imaging, database selection decisions, and digitization workflows. The workshop will be held at The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois April 24-25, 2013. Watch this page for updates in the near future.
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. It will be held at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas on March 5-6, 2013. For more information, please visit the workshop announcement.
This Hackathon addresses OCR output and natural language parsing of natural history museum's specimen label data. It will be held on February 13-14, 2013, in Fort Worth, Texas concurrent with the iConference. Participants will include those interested in Natural Language Parsing, Optical Character Recognition, User Interfaces, and use of these tools by scientists and the public to access natural history museum collections data.
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!
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.
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.
A special iDigBio Blog Contribution by:
Austin Hendy, Ph.D.
Florida Museum of Natural History
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.
iDigBio 2012 Summit
October 23-24, 2012
UPDATE: The second annual iDigBio Summit was a great success! Thanks to all who participated! The presentations and notes have been uploaded and linked in the Summit summary document.
The second annual iDigBio summit will be held on October 23-24, 2012, in Gainesville, FL. The summit is presented by iDigBio, the national resource and HUB (Home Uniting Biocollections), at the University of Florida and Florida State University for the Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program.
Butterfly Festival
Florida Museum of Natural History
October 13-14 2012
iDigBio will be represented by iDigBio project staff Kevin Love, Joanna McCaffrey and Principal Investigator Larry Page at the Florida Museum of Natural History “ButterflyFest” on October 13 & 14th, 2012. This annual festival is dedicated to increasing awareness of Florida's butterflies as fun, fascinating ambassadors of the natural world. iDigBio staff will be promoting inquiry about biodiversity and the grand challenges of the digitization community while advancing a call to action for the conservation and preservation of backyard wildlife and habitats.
Developing an implementation plan for the Strategic Plan for a Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA)
Reston, Virginia
September 17th - 18th, 2012
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.
The Georeferencing Working Group at iDigBio is pleased to host the first "Train-the-Trainers" Georeferencing Workshop to be held October 8-12, 2012, in Gainesville, Florida. Participants will learn the fundamentals of georeferencing best practices with a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises, including paper maps, the MaNIS Georeferencing Calculator, GEOLocate, BioGeomancer and online exercises. Special attention will be paid to the specific and unique georeferencing needs of the TCNs.
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.
Dr. Bruce MacFadden will deliver a presentation entitled “Fossils In The Cloud” on April 6th, from 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM. The presentation will be delivered in the iDiBio conference room located on the 3rd floor of Building 105 (105 NW 16th Street, Gainesville FL 32603).
To attend, please RSVP to Cathy Bester.
Abstract:
About 100 million fossils are stored in research collections in the US. Only a tiny fraction of these are ever placed on exhibit for the public to appreciate. Many of these remain behind closed doors, limiting access. This talk describes the new iDigBio program. Over the next 10 years, iDigBio will coordinate the uploading of natural history specimen images (including fossils) and associated data from over 500 U.S. institutions to a cloud portal. In so doing, fossils, and other natural history specimens, will become more widely available to scientists, educators, and the general public.
iDigBio staff members, Gil Nelson and Debbie Paul are off to the InvertNet One: Workshop on Collection Digitization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://illinois.edu/
Hosted by: The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC)
Who:
Gil Nelson will present a talk about Digitization Workflows, including benchmarks and recommended practices obtained from digitization workflow observations.
The University of Florida's Advanced Computing and Information Systems Laboratory (ACIS) will speak about what iDigBio appliances are, how they can help an institution, and how the iDigBio specimen database and portal will work to integrate collections data.
Representatives from Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs) will attend to present project overviews.
When: June 11th - 16th, 2012
Where: Yale University, New Haven CT
For additional details regarding this event, please visit the SPNHC 2012 Annual Meeting website.
Hosted by: Tampa Bay Fossil Club (TBFC)
Who: Dr. Bruce MacFadden (Curator and Professor at the Florida Museum of Natural History/iDigBio Co-PI) will be giving a talk titled "Fossils In The Cloud"
When: Saturday, February 4, 2012
Where: University of South Florida, Behavioral Science Rm #103
Studying Digitization and Databasing Workflows
Who & What & Why:
iDigBio staff members, Gil Nelson and Deborah Paul are excited about upcoming visits to a series of natural history museums with current digitization projects in process. To illuminate what imaging and data-basing techniques and strategies are currently in use and might represent a possible better practice, they are collecting data about and videos of data-basing in progress.
Where & When:
American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and New York Botanical Garden (NYBG)
