SilverCollection - Web Portal for Biological Collections

This is our first newsletter for our planned image tour and we would like to thank everyone that has submitted a request for us to visit.

In this Issue:

• How to stay informed
• Who we will be visiting and when
• SERNEC meeting during ASB
• Final Result

How to stay informed:

We will be communicating through newsletters like this one and our special webpage at: http://www.silverbiology.com/botany2010/imagingtour.html.  Our goal is to provide as much information about what we are doing to get ready for this imaging tour.  If you have any questions about this event that we have not addressed please let us know.

Who we will be visiting and when:

Currently we are still collecting invitations on who we will be visiting and where you would like us to go.  We will be accepting requests until May 1st.  At that time we will start to plan a route and confirm some dates that we are able to visit.  Once we get in contact with each collection we will post the planned schedule online. The map that we will be using is located here: SilverBiology Imaging Tour 2010 Map

Current we have included everyone that has made a request with the following key:

• Green Icons = Invited
• Yellow Icons = Pending Invitation
• Red = Confirmed Location and Date

SERNEC meeting during ASB:

Tom Sasek will be presenting an overview about CyberFlora Louisiana (http://news.cyberfloralouisiana.com/) and how well the imaging method works.  This SilverBiology method will be the same as what we will be demonstrating during the tour.  We would also like for you to encourage other SERNEC members that are interested in digitization efforts to join in the tour or come visit while we are giving our demonstration.  We can only visit so many collections during this tour but knowing everyone that is interested might encourage us to extend or follow up with a second tour in the near future.

Final Result:

The final result will be an online SilverCollection web portal that will have all images and information available that we have processed.  This will be a small fraction of the total specimens in the United States but should act as a viable solution for larger plans for state and regional efforts.  We will also include a related webpage that will contain all the information about how we processed this data, how long it took and anything else that is related.

Have some ideas?

We hope to learn more about providing national imaging and processing solutions.  We hope to demonstrate simple, efficient, and quick solutions to mobilizing scientific collections.  We will continue to listen and do whatever we can to make our software as user friendly as possible.  If you have an idea you can send an email to: contact@silverbiology.com or reply back to this email and let me know what is on your mind.

If you know someone that would like to receive future newsletters they can go to:
http://www.silverbiology.com/newsletter/

SilverBiology will be exhibiting again this year at the SPNHC 2009.  The conference is to take place on July 6th - 11th, 2009 in Leiden, Netherlands.

Bridging Continents presents new, large-scaled infrastructure projects in natural history collections, the state-of-art in collection care and best practice, the latest on digitization of collections and much more. http://www.spnhc2009.org

We will be showcasing our newest version of SilverCollection, our web portal for biological collections.  We have a new api and some great new features we are excited to show off.

We have also been doing research in fuzzy matching for scientific names and will be showing how TAXAMATCH web service can be used to help with scientific literature.

If your museum has an Arthropod, Herbarium, or other start to a digital collection we really want to speak with you during the meeting. We have some additional tools coming out this year that should help with imaging and processing scientific data.

We strive to build good working relationships with museums to improve our software, create open source tools, and offer custom solutions to your specific needs.

See you there!

Ever wanted to know where all the historical plants are stored? How about bugs, insects, spiders, butterflies, or fish? Well with the help of Biodiversity Collection Index (BCI) and their wonderful resources of information we are finally able to get a true interactive visualization of how our world is collected and where that information is housed.

Visit the Interactive Map (http://labs.silverbiology.com/biocol)

Research into biodiversity relies on the use of specimens. These specimens are held in reference collections around the world. BCI is a central index to these collections. With the help of BCI’s Web Services, SilverBiology was able to use its new open source web tool SilverMapper to easily map the location of these collections.

This data source is directly based on the data from the Biodiversity Collection Index (BCI) and all geospatial data is estimated on Google Maps reverse geocoding service to establish a latitude and longitude.

Why did we do this?

We wanted to show a real world example of our new program SilverMapper and at the same time provide something useful for the community. Comments and suggestions are welcome.  I would also like to thank Roger Hyam for all his hard work over at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh for really bringing the Biodiversity Collection Index together.  I hope this little demonstration will encourage collection managers to update their information with the exact latitude and longitude position at BCI to help provide the precise location of where people can find their collection.