Big things have small beginnings: Curating a large natural history collection - processes and lessons learned

In the fall of 2013, the chair of Biological Sciences asked the IR librarian about digitizing the herbarium collection and including it in The Keep. A meeting between the IR librarian and Herbarium Curator Dr. Tucker thus began a project that would represent the maturing of The Keep into a substantial repository, involve both the IR librarian and the Head of Library Technology Services, and require steep learning curves in a number of areas including equipment procurement, metadata schema, data manipulation, and cross-platform communication. By opening up the collection for discovery, scholars around the world would see what is available and potentially request the loan of the physical sheets for further study or genetic analysis. This paper describes the process of digitizing this valuable content to make it available for researchers and students around the world.

Todd Bruns ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1197-2521