Friday, May 9, 2014

iDigBio's Push for Digitization


Some of you may have heard of a little group called iDigBio. It started a few years back with a big grant from NSF. It is working to help natural history collections around the United States (both university collections and museum collections) digitize their materials. I have worked with iDigBio on various projects over the last few years, and I wanted to extol their virtues here briefly.

iDigBio (which stands for Integrated Digitized Biocollections) has been the first group I know of that has really had the funding, the national scope, and the cooperation of many different institutions and groups to be able to bring together researchers and staff from all types of biological collections. iDigBio has hosted workshops on a variety of topics. They have put together working groups that have created documents to help guide other institutions as they begin (or continue) their digitization journey. If you haven't encountered iDigBio yet, take a minute to check it out: http://www.idigbio.org.
Consider this the first of a series of posts about different aspects of iDigBio, and what it is doing to help our country's museums, university collections, researchers, students, and you.