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The Inaugural WeDigBio Event: Global Event Advances Digitization and Science Literacy

Hundreds of volunteers around the world transcribed >30,000 specimen labels at 25 events over four days (Oct 22–25, 2015) in the first Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio) event.  Events spanned a range of formal and informal education venues, from middle-school and undergraduate science classrooms to county libraries to museums, universities, and botanical gardens, such as the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural Histor

iDigBio and the EMu NHSIG in Philadelphia

iDigBio was delighted with Axiell's generous invitation to present a half-day digitization workshop at the annual meeting of the EMu user group Natural History Special Interest Group (NHSIG), held October 7 at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. After determining via survey what EMu users would be interested in hearing about, we fashioned the following well-received agenda:

Exploring unique values in iDigBio using Apache Spark

Data exploration for large datasets is always challenging. Often you are left with deciding between subsetting the dataset (randomly or on some facet), making slow progress waiting for results just to find that something needs to be fixed, or optimizing code for performance when you don't even know if the result is going to be interesting. Having a high-performance system capable of ad-hoc investigation has always been difficult and/or expensive.

Tales from the iDigBio Booth: American Society of Mammalogists Conference

We (Deb Paul, Cathy Bester, and Molly Phillips) had a fun and productive time staffing the iDigBio exhibit at the 95th Annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, June 12-15, 2015. We set up the 10’ exhibit with the TV displaying the iDigBio Explore Research video series (thank you to Kevin Love and Chris Baker for helping us set up!).

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The Results of the 2015 iDigBio Community Survey are In!

Each year, iDigBio surveys its internal team and the collections community, broader scientific community, partners, stakeholders, and others interested in the national digitization effort to find out how we are doing. We use the feedback to inform our decision-making and to help us set priorities and determine next steps. We are grateful to the nearly 250 individuals who participated in this year’s survey!

Florida State University Transcription Blitz with Florida Native Plant Society

On Friday, May 29, Florida State University held a transcription blitz for attendees of the Florida Native Plant Society Annual Conference. This was the third digitization blitz hosted by iDigBio, the Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections Thematic Collections Network, and FSU's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium.

SPNHC 2015: Sowing the Seeds of Digitization

The Florida Museum of Natural History and partners hosted the 30th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) from May 17-23, 2015, at the Hilton University of Florida Conference Center in Gainesville, Florida. The theme of the conference was “Making Natural History Collections Accessible Through New and Innovative Approaches and Partnerships”.

Field to Database (F2DB): field-data collecting trends and 21st century data skills

From Deb Paul, @idbdeb

This 4-day hands-on short course in March investigated current trends in collecting, and focused on best practices and skills development for supporting the collection and sharing of robust, fit-for-research-use data.

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