ACCELERATING DIGITIZATION OF BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH SPECIMENS THROUGH ONLINE PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Hundreds of millions of biodiversity research specimens remain to be digitized, including a variety of extant and extinct organisms that have been collected over the last few centuries. Digitization of specimens and supporting source materials (e.g., field collecting notebooks) has value in research, especially in the context of providing a historical and current baseline of diversity and distributions against which to compare new samples and project changes to diversity and distribution into the future. However, meeting this ambitious goal requires increased collaboration, technological innovation, and broader engagement in digitization beyond the walls of biodiversity research collections. Engaging the public in digitization, rather than simply hiring more digitizers, promises to both serve the digitizing institutions and further public understanding of biodiversity science. We recognize 24 digitization activities in which the public could potentially participate online and discuss relevant resources (tools, standards, and best practice documents) and areas for improvements in three broad areas: label and ledger transcription from digital images, georeferencing from collection locality descriptions, and specimen annotation from images. We discuss seven high priority steps that can be taken in this relatively young community of practice (e.g., experiments related to quality control, formalization of relationships with overlapping communities of practice such as the digital humanities). And we conclude with a brief introduction to iDigBio's Biospex tool (www.biospex.org) which provides project management functionality for public participation tools like Notes from Nature (www.notesfromnature.org). The field of public participation in digitization of biodiversity research specimens is clearly in a growth phase with many emerging opportunities for scientists, educators, and the public.