Considering the mass of objects I'm managing, I am obviously interested in developing solutions that would speed up metadata enrichment, but I'm also keen in leveraging such historical biodiversity data for timely research questions related to conservation.
AlessiaGuggisberg
50
I am employed by ETH Zurich to manage the plant vascular collection of the United Herbaria of the University and ETH Zurich, the second largest herbarium in Switzerland, totalling about 4 million specimens. Over the past six years, I have run several digitisation projects aimed at inventorying, photographing and databasing part of our collections. So far, ca. 15% of the collection, for a total of approximately 350,000 specimens, have been imaged and publicly released in GBIF. For all of them, we have recorded minimal metadata, but some subprojects received more attention, leading to complete label transcription and georeferencing of sampling location (e.g. 50,000 of the 90,000 specimens from Valais). In parallel, I have inventoried all species filed in our collections for a total of nearly 125,000 taxon names.