A great shout-out to our volunteers!
An article was just published which highlights the wonderful work that our volunteers have been doing.
It is called Citizen Volunteers Pitch in on Digitization Backlog and is in the journal BioScience. Once again a sincere thanks for the enormous efforts of our volunteers!
Notes from Nature 
Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall! Still nice to hear that we’ve been recognised, but it’d be even nicer to be able to read the details… are there highlights that could be shown under fair use?
I am going to ask the author if we can post it on Notes from Nature.
re: “I am going to ask the author if we can post it on Notes from Nature.”
May not be allowed: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/bioscience/for_authors/
“It is a condition of publication for all Oxford Journals that authors grant an exclusive license to Oxford University Press or the sponsoring Society.”
Citizen Volunteers Pitch in on Digitization Backlog
NANCY AVERETT
A ground beetle from Tierra del Fuego
collected by Charles Darwin; six Asian
fairy-bluebirds gathered by British
Raj officer Allan Octavian Hume;
and the tiny blossoms of poisonous
white snakeroot, one of nearly 800,000
plants preserved by Louisiana botany
professor R. Dale Thomas—these are
among the biological specimens housed
in museums around the world. “They’re
a treasure trove,” says Robert Guralnick,
associate curator of biodiversity informatics
at the University of Florida. “But
they’re locked away and difficult to
access unless you have an in.”
Guralnick and other experts are part
of the massive ongoing effort to digitize
the records of natural history collections
(see, e.g., doi:10.1093/biosci/
biv005 and doi:10.1093/biosci/bit006).
With an estimated two billion museum
specimens around the world, the task
is daunting and expensive. That is
where Notes from Nature (NfN), an
online citizen science project, comes
in. Anyone with Internet access can
log in and transcribe records from
natural history samples found at more
than 200 institutions. “Realizing that
we could use citizen scientists to help
with this huge backlog was an ‘a-ha’
moment,” Gurlanick says. “We knew
there were people out there who would
think these objects were cool and
would be up for the challenge.”
So far, more than 7000 people have
transcribed some one million specimens
since the project went live in
April 2013.
NfN was the brainchild of three consortia:
the Natural History Museum of
London, which wants to digitize ornithology
ledgers; the Calbug project,
which is focusing on pinned insect
collections from nine California institutions;
and the Southeastern Regional
Network of Expertise and Collections
(SERNEC) project, which hopes to
digitize plant specimens from 222 herbaria.
In 2012, each submitted a proposal
to the Citizen Science Alliance,
a collaboration of scientists, software
developers, and educators who are
behind Zooniverse, a leading Web
site for citizen science projects. “[The
CSA] came to us and said, ‘Hey we
got a handful of these proposals for
museum specimens. How about you
guys work together?’” says Michael
Denslow, project manager with
SERNEC and chair of the NfN steering
committee.
Over the next year, Denslow,
Guralnick, and other NfN steering
committee members developed
the user interface (with help from
Zooniverse and Vizzuality). Volunteers
can transcribe specimens from four
categories: plants, macrofungi, insects,
and birds. They view scanned photos
of actual specimens with identification
tags attached or ledger pages
with detailed data about particular
specimens and type in basic information,
such as species name and where
and when the specimen was found.
“It’s not always easy,” says Guralnick.
“Sometimes, you’re dealing with crazy
eighteenth-century flourishy handwriting
where you’re trying to figure
out, is that an R or an N?” To ensure
accuracy, he says, each item is transcribed
four times, usually by four
different volunteers.
Volunteers come from all over the
world, although most of the regulars
hail from the United States and Great
Britain. To keep interest in the project
strong, steering committee members
contribute to a blog aimed at informing
volunteers. The posts range from
announcing National Moth Week to
sharing an infographic showing the
time difference between plant and
insect transcription (the former takes,
on average, 61 seconds longer) and
including short profiles on volunteers
such as Britain’s Jonathan Moore, who
says, “I love reading the careful notes
and imagining the collector in the
middle of nowhere, in the sun or rain,
finding their plant and taking their
samples and data.”
A number of the volunteers are
scientists, which does not surprise
Guralnick, who himself does some
of the transcription. “I care about the
data,” he says. “It enhances the work
I do professionally as a researcher.”
Guralnick strongly believes that
digitizing the records will help with
biodiversity
research by, among other
things, creating better models of species
distribution, which, he says, is
urgently needed in the face of climate
change and increasing species
extinction.
Denslow says that they plan to scale
up the project to include a greater
number of specimen types and also to
include those that must be transcribed
in languages other than English. He
says that one satisfying thing about the
project is that it appears to be creating
greater interest in the museum objects.
“We’re finding that as museums put
more data out there online, they are
getting more requests to see and use
the actual specimen itself,” he says.
“At the end of the day, this is about
an actual physical flower sitting on a
shelf. You just scratch the surface by
looking at it online. Then you need to
come to the museum and measure it,
analyze its DNA, and all those other
things.”
Nancy Averett is a freelance journalist who enjoys
writing about science, social issues, and athletes.
Her work has appeared in Audubon, Runner’s
World, Bicycling, Pacific Standard, and Inc.
Thank you so much!