Public Participation Platforms
Public Participation Platforms
This page can be linked to using the shortlink, https://bit.ly/idigbio-ppplatforms.
iDigBio gathers information about public participation platforms to share with the natural history collections community, both as an online resource available to anyone, and as a reference specifically for participants in our Digitization Academy courses. We have asked representatives of each platform to respond to a survey containing a standard set of questions, which we believe can be helpful for potential new users comparing options. These surveys, as well as additional resources, are organized alphabetically below.
If you are a platform representative and wish to be added to this list, or to update the information here, please contact Erica Krimmel (ekrimmel@fsu.edu).
BIOSPEX
BIOSPEX is a base camp for launching, advertising, and managing targeted efforts to digitize the world's 3 billion biodiversity research specimens in ways that involve the public. As of 2021, the production site is tailored to support public engagement activities on the Zooniverse platform but successful support for activities at GEOLocate’s Collaborative Georeferencing platform have also been developed in a forked version of BIOSPEX with plans to fold those into the production site in the future.
Die Herbonauten
Die Herbonauten is a herbarium specimen transcription platform addressing German speaking Citizen Scientists with a strong interest in botany and natural history in general.
DigiVol
DigiVol offers transcription and camera trap identification. It is Australian owned and based, and works closely with many local institutions. DigiVol is unconditional, free to use, and includes a choice of validation: volunteer manual or auto-consensus.
DoeDat
The DoeDat platform is designed for, and mainly directed towards, the transcription and enrichment of natural history collections. Over time, it has gained functionality that makes it attractive to other types of transcription tasks such as those in the digital humanities (postcards, maps, pictures, posters, etc.). DoeDat is also highly suitable for species detection and identification on camera trap (wild camera) images.
FromThePage
FromThePage focuses on textual transcription, OCR correction and metadata description of digitized documents.
GEOLocate CoGe
GEOLocate CoGe (Collaborative Georeferencing Platform) is designed to facilitate determining geospatial attributes where biological collections have been made.
Les Herbonautes
Notes from Nature
Notes From Nature's primary data providers are researchers and museums interested in transcription or classification of specimen images. The vast majority of these partners are from North America, but the platform is very interested in working with individuals or collections from other areas of the world.
Smithsonian Transcription Center
Launched in 2013, Transcription Center is the Smithsonian Institution’s largest crowdsourcing platform, enlisting the help of over 58,000 digital volunteers to transcribe and review over 946,000 pages of materials from across the Smithsonian’s vast museum and archival collections. With projects ranging in content from currency proof sheets and historic audio recordings to biodiversity specimens and astronomical logbooks, Transcription Center draws curious learners around the world looking to contribute to accessibility and discoverability of knowledge in their spare time.
Symbiota
Symbiota is an open-source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data, particularly that of natural history specimens. It is both a robust content management system (CMS) and a tool for biodiversity data exploration. Managers of biodiversity data in Symbiota-based portals can use a crowdsourcing module to engage the public in digitization activities such as transcription, georeferencing, and data cleaning. Data/collections managers can add subsets of specimens to the "crowdsourcing queue", where they are then available to be edited by users who have created accounts in the portal. Once the records have been changed to a processing status of "Pending Review" by the crowdsourcers, the specimens are removed from the queue, and the data are instantly "live" in the portal. They are also added to a review panel so that data/collections managers can view and revert edits as needed.
The major advantages to using Symbiota crowdsourcing--particularly for collections that manage their data in the portal--include (1) records to be crowdsourced can be added to the queue easily, without having to navigate any external sites, (2) data entered by crowdsourcers are instantly entered into the database and do not require re-upload into the data portal, and (3) crowdsourcers can take advantage of advanced tools including duplicate searching (and data copying), coordinate formatting and conversion, and dropdown lists for geographic and taxonomic fields.
Because the data are instantly available and only one person needs to edit a record for it to be added to the database, the Symbiota crowdsourcing tools are most appropriate for well-trained volunteers/crowdsourcers or those that can be actively managed by data/collections managers.
Zooniverse
Since the launch of its first project in 2007, Zooniverse has become a core part of the research infrastructure landscape. For research teams with large numbers of images, audio clips, or video files that need tagging, annotating, marking and/or transcribing, crowdsourcing the effort through Zooniverse provides a unique and effective solution to unlocking the large datasets that characterize our modern research landscape. With over 2 million participants worldwide in over 80 active projects, Zooniverse also provides a transformative tool for meaningfully engaging the public in real research and discovery.