Guest Blogger: Ria D'Aversa, Creating Partnerships Through Digitization

Here at California Academy of Sciences I work on the Global Plants Initiative (GPI) project in the Botany department. Like Connecting Content, it aims to provide scientific resources and materials to the public through an online platform. In the instance of GPI the materials are botanical type specimens, which are, simply put, the specimen cited by the author of any new botanical species. These specimens offer essential information including plant type and description, collecting location, and nomenclatural evolutions. The plant specimens are photographed in the Botany department. The images are then sent to our partner organization JSTOR, who uploads the information to the project page (http://plants.jstor.org). These efforts provide distant researchers, students, and amateur botanists a more accessible opportunity to study plants and botanical history. Many people can now focus on their areas of botanical interest from their home computer instead of traveling to the Academy for research.

(CAS0003527) Isotype of Scalesia stewartii Riley

 

At the GPI conference this year I highlighted Connecting Content’s efforts to digitize field collections and field notes of the botanist Alban Stewart from the Academy’s 1905-06 Galapagos expedition. The Botany department holds many important botanical collections from the Galapagos expeditions, including the pivotal 1905-06 journey. In the future I would like to use the ancillary materials (field notes, correspondence, photographs, and drawings) from the Academy archives for the GPI project in collaboration with Connecting Content. It would be a significant intersection between the Botany department and library collections, which would hopefully provide the public with additional resources to dissect and learn from.

(CAS0000313) Holotype of Alternanthera filifolia subsp. glauca J. T. Howell

Research institutions are moving quickly toward new media with most providing their collections online. Both Connecting Content and GPI illustrate how we are establishing partnerships with other institutions in order to provide and promote the best research materials for future scientific study.

-Ria D'Aversa