Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

Page transcription

May 5, 1969
INFORMAL CONFERENCE ON DATA PROCESSING
IN THE HERBARIUM
DEPARTMENT OF BOTANY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

The early formative years of the world's great museums and botanical gardens were devoted to building up plant collections. There are now about 17 institutions in Europe and North America with holdings of over 2,000,000 specimens. Sheer size has long been considered a sign of excellence, but few would argue that further significant increases in numbers of specimens in large herbaria actually enhance the value of the collections proportionately. On the contrary, size alone brings into sharper focus two immediate problems: the ever-mounting costs of collection management, i.e., the cost of technicians to process and file specimens, loans, and exchanges, as well as the storage costs, herbarium cases, and additional floor space; and, secondly, the realization that greater size does not lead to easier or more complete accessibility of data.

The herbarium is in effect a large data bank, a kind of sheet file arranged phylogenetically and/or alphabetically by taxon, family, genus, and species. Much of the data in herbaria are effectively locked up unless multiple files on locality data, collectors, etc. are concurrently maintained, a near hopeless task. The time is rapidly approaching when taxonomists must look for new means to make data from herbarium collections available to other botanists or plant users, as well as expedite the storage and dissemination of taxonomic research. The anticipated needs of the Flora North America project alone will amply justify any efforts in this direction.

If botany is to follow the development of information retrieval in other fields, then the most important tool will be electronic data processing (EDP). In simplest terms, the computer enables us to construct multiple card files to taxon, geography, collector, date of collections etc., or any combination of these descriptors, which may be printed out on sheets or on cards.

The storage capabilities, versatility, and speed of large, modern computers are unquestioned, and the kind of information recorded for botanical specimens seems tailor-made for computer input. Why, then, have so few herbaria explored data processing as a collection management and retrieval system, and for that matter why is there in operation no computerized data bank for any major herbarium?