SilverCollection - Web Portal for Biological Collections

SilverBiology is proud to announce that they have been selected by CyberFlora Louisiana to design, manage, develop, and provide technical guidance on the digitization of more then 1 million herbarium specimen sheets.  SilverCollection will be the official web portal for the herbarium collections in Louisiana.

SilverCollection is a webportal for biological collections and will be the primary interface to over 1.3 million herbarium specimens.  There will be custom features designed to focus on the CyberFlora project goals and a highly useful “api/web service” to interact with the data.

SilverBiology will be also introducing new software products this year in conjunction with the Cyberflora project.  Our goal is to develop new tools during the development of the Louisiana Herbarium Database to show as a model and ways for other consortia can follow.

This is a big endeavor and our team is excited to be working with Cyberflora Louisiana.

To find out more about the project you can monitor the official Cyberflora Louisiana Blog at: http://news.cyberfloralouisiana.com

We are happy to present another new feature for SilverCollection. We continue to develop new tools and features to our software based on feedback from our clients. One of our recent requests was to support more browsing features and specifically being able to browse around with the collectors. So what we have come up with is a new browse feature that does just that. Currently we have 2 new methods of looking through the collection.

The first method is by Last Name. Simply choose the starting letter (A) then check or descend down a particular path to see what this person has collected (B). At any time one or more items can be checked to instantly display those results. You can always mix match with other information in the different sections of the browsing tool for more flexibility and instant results.

The second method is by date range. Currently we support century and decades. For more specific ranges I would recommend using the search tool for more exact breakdowns. Here we can do the same as the “by Last Name” except we have a filter for any collector that has collected specimens in the collection related to the decade that we are looking at. In the below example we are looking at 7 specimens of Fimbristylis in the 1920’s from collector Brown, Clair.

The collection information is based on to values derived from the Collectors field and the EarliestDateCollected. Both are based on the DarwinCore 1.4 format and work under the same constraints.

After several requests for tracking support for SilverCollection it has finally arrived. SilverCollection has now been configured to support Google Analytics for logging information about visitors actions.

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We are pleased to be exhibiting at the NSCA–SPNHC 2008 Joint Meeting in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (May 13th–17 th, 2008)

If you are attending please stop by our booth and let us show you a presentation on SilverCollection.

For more information about the convention visit: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/nsca-spnhc

We will also be at the Herbarium Curators/TORCH Meeting on Saturday May 18th, 2008

We are happy to announce the release of SilverCollection v1.0.  SilverCollection is an interactive web portal for herbaria and other biological collections.  It is a client-specific customized application for online access to specimen data.  This application provides an interactive solution for curating, searching, and browsing your collection records.

To find out more about the software visit: collection.silverbiology.com