As iDigBio draws close to the end of 15 years of National Science Foundation support, we are pleased to announce the upcoming webinar series:
Sustaining Collections Digitization Beyond NSF Funding. A primary goal of the series is to encourage the highly talented collections community to continue the great work that has been accomplished during the last two decades through NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC), Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR), and Sustaining Infrastructure for Biological Research (Sustaining) programs, plus funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and numerous local sources. Thanks to the work and contributions of more than 1,000 biodiversity collections in 350 institutions across the U.S., the iDigBio portal now hosts nearly 150 million specimen records and 65 million media files from 2,000 datasets. These invaluable data have been contributed by museums and other academic institutions spanning the U.S. and represent a massive achievement of the U.S. biodiversity collections community. These data, which are freely available to all interested parties through iDigBio, GBIF, Symbiota, Specify, Arctos, and other aggregators, have become an essential and widely used resource for research, education, and outreach. As we shift to a new chapter in the national digitization and data mobilization enterprise, the collections community is well-positioned to sustain the digitization products and practices it has created. The webinar series is designed to encourage and motivate the sharing of protocols, practices, and strategies for ensuring the long-term continuation of biological collections digitization and data mobilization. All webinars will be recorded, and the recordings will be made available at the link above.