The United States National Herbarium was founded in 1848, and it now holds five million specimens, with a particular strength in type specimens. Housed in the botany collections of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the herbarium’s collection is now part of a new crowdsourcing project that allows anyone with Internet access to view and transcribe data from specimens and contribute to the expansion of the herbarium’s collections database. It’s a terrific way to engage with plants as historical artifacts, design objects, and, of course, as botanical specimens, while essentially doing important work for the Smithsonian from the comfort of your own device.
After registration, which requires no special credentials or knowledge, you can begin transcribing the text from the labels into a web form. The data you enter, once approved, becomes part of the specimens’ record. Sylvia Orli, an information manager from the department of botany who helps facilitate the NMNH’s program, says the transcription project is part of a global effort to digitize natural history records. Within the NMNH, the department of botany is among the first to use the new crowdsourcing transcription tool, and several other units within the Smithsonian are participating as well.
For designers, there is the opportunity to gain intimate knowledge of plants’ anatomy, as well as to admire their unique architectural properties. The specimens currently on view are visually exquisite, which is no accident, Orli says. “We put up our sexier plants! We try to put up our most striking specimens—if we put up a bunch of grass specimens, it wouldn’t be as exciting.” The department of botany currently has both historical and contemporary specimens up for transcription in the Tiliaceae and Passifloraceae families and the Gossypium (cotton) genus.
The botanical specimens are intriguing for historians as well as scientists, because the field books from which many of the specimens are derived are historical objects, while the plants themselves are collected for the botany department, among others. “If you are interested in the historical context for the specimens, you can transcribe the field notes,” Orli says, “or you can transcribe the botanical specimen labels.”
Field books’ transcriptions have been extraordinarily successful. “Over the first six months, nine of the field books were complete. In the last two months, 14 more were done,” says Riccardo Ferrante, the director of digital services and IT archivist at the Smithsonian Archives. Transcribing the field books and their specimens allows researchers to do more sophisticated analysis on more data. Once you have more material, Ferrante says, you can begin to map and trace how plant species move in to regions or change over time.
The NMNH currently has a number of interesting field books available for transcription, and new ones go up all the time.
- Field notes, Death Valley Expedition, 1891. Frederick V. Coville, later the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief botanist and honorary curator of the National Herbarium. Primarily desert plants.
- Joseph Francis Rock’s Field Book No. 16001-18850. Collecting in China from May 1928 to November 1929. Mostly botanical specimens in Asia.
- Journal of Facts in Natural History. Volume 1, 1860–1868. Benjamin Dann Walsh, state entomologist of Illinois. Rock Island area of the Mississippi River. From the description: “Try your hand at transcribing the first volume of Walsh’s detailed notes of insects in this region and help us expand our understanding of Mississippi River biodiversity during the Civil War.”
- Smithsonian African expedition under the direction of Col. Theodore Roosevelt (1909–1910), book 1, numbers 1–1858.
The Smithsonian Transcription project can be accessed here: https://transcription.si.edu.Images courtesy the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.