Digitization and the richness of type specimens at the Paris Herbarium -

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Digitization and the richness of type specimens
at the Paris Herbarium -
Spotlight on the Global Plants Initiative

• Pascale Chesselet Jean-Noël Labat
• Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle
• Paris, France

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Global PlantsInitiative

• The aim of GPI
• To build a comprehensive online research tool
  aggregating and linking scholarly botanical
  resources around the world

http//plants.jstor.org
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International collaboration148 institutes in 52
countries
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High-Resolution Type Specimens and Supporting
Materials
24 bit colour, 600 dpi, Tiff Original scans 200
Meg Flashpix technology 50-80 Meg multiple
versions of files within itself FSI Viewer
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High resolution

• 8 X what can be seen with the naked eye

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Herbier Nationalde Paris (P PC)

• 11 million specimens
• gt 600 000 types
• Vascular Plants Cryptogams

Paris, Kew, New York, Geneva
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Type specimen digitization
Image scan
Bar code Label data capture
Search for types Verification
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Joseph Pitton de TournefortVoyage to the Middle
East 1700-1702
Data Dissections Detail measurements
Annotations Original polynomial
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Types of economically important plants
Siphonia brasiliensis Willd.
Triticum durum Desf.
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Total 978 108 specimens digitized of which 120
773 are types
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Geographic coverage of type secimens
Vascular Plants
Cryptogams
America Asia Oceania New Caledonia
North Africa Tropical Africa Madagascar Europe
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African Plants Initiative

• 453 609 objects
• 118 collections
• 114 contributors
• 31 countries
• 4 years
• 60 000 species

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API - Taxonomic backbone
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JSTOR Plant Science
At the end of the project, the database should
host 2.2 million type specimens that will be
digitized, ingested and available on the website
by 2012
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Features of GPI

• Linking related materials - literature on Jstor
• Several languages English, French, Portuguese
  Spanish
• Materials available from archival documents to
  periodicals, books, reports, manuscripts,
  reference works, maps, specimens, illustrations.
• Advanced online tools
• and more.

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How people are using GPI

• Research (GPI, JStor)
• Discovery (microscope surrogate)
• Measuring recording measurements
• Species identification
• Plant uses
• Sharing
• Editing and refining the data

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Outcome

• Comprehensive datasets
• Data repatriation
• Tools for taxonomists
• Building capacity - taxonomists
• Fundamental species data (types) available
  world-wide