ADVANCING THE DIGITIZATION OF BIODIVERSITY COLLECTIONS (ADBC) AND IDIGBIO: MODELS FOR MOBILIZING DIGITAL DATA FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION IN THE GEOSCIENCES

The first two decades of the 21^st Century have seen a rapid rise in the creation, mobilization, and research use of digital museum data, especially in the natural and biodiversity sciences. This has thrust natural history museums and their collections into a renewed public spotlight that exposes and underscores their central role in the scientific enterprise as well as in K-12, undergraduate, and informal community education. The advent of such digitization and data mobilization initiatives as the United States National Foundation’s (NSF) Advancing the Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), NSF’s national coordinating center for digitization and data mobilization increased opportunities for museum constituencies—researchers, educators, students, and informal leaners—to view and visit museums and the specimens they hold in new and innovative ways. In its short 6-year history, the iDigBio portal has amassed nearly 106 million records representing over 300 million specimens from over 300 museums. These digital resources raise the profiles and exposure of participating museums academic collections, exposing them to wider audiences and ensuring that museum-based research remains at the forefront of science. The success of ADBC and iDigBio, which includes the digitization and mobilization of paleo fossil data but not strictly geologic samples, suggests a powerful model for increasing access to geoscience samples and building comprehensive geoscience databases.