Notes from Nature and the Push To A Million

Some quick Notes from Nature updates! As you might have noticed, our numbers of transciptions have occassionally grown by leaps and bounds over the last months. What gives? The shortest possible answer is “Ornithology Ledgers” and the truly impressive effort happening there. Back in late June, we had 149,537 Ornithology transcriptions. As of last Sunday Oct. 12, 2014, that number is now 294,973. Wow. That is a lot of work in 4 months. None of those Ornithology records had been included in our total counts (that show up on our homepage), because we had originally been focusing on counting ledger “pages” not transcriptions. And we still have to generate those ledger record counts separately from our logs every few weeks and add them into the total. We hope to solve the problem with manual additions to the total in the near future. So if you see the count “jump” every few weeks, that’s why.

Speaking of counting, many weeks ago we tried to better report the “per collection” statistics, in particular the amount of effort needed to complete work on a collection. We have recently refined those numbers YET AGAIN, and we hope the current reporting is (at least) less confusing. The long story short is each record is transcribed multiple times, and that number is usually 4 times. We have plans to make this more efficient in the future, but until then, this is a workable number of replicate transcriptions. However, occassionally that number is 5 or 6 (for reasons that have to do with both history and some techology glitches). When you add all this up, it was hard to give an exact number of total transcriptions needed.

Now, if you look at any introduction to collections page – take the Herbarium project (http://www.notesfromnature.org/#/archives/herbarium) – you will see total number of images, total number of active images, total number of complete images and a count of transcriptions completed. The active plus complete image numbers should add up to the total number.  And the total number of transcrptions gives an overall assessment of effort by our citizen science volunteers. The percent completed is now calculated in terms of images not transcriptions (i.e., completed images divided by the total images).

We mention all this because Notes from Nature is closing in on a HUGE MILESTONE — one million transcriptions! We only have 113,000 transcriptions or so to go.  We will mention this more in upcoming blog posts as we make what we hope is a BIG PUSH to 1 million!

ONE MILLION TRANSCRIPTIONS