SciColl presentations at SPNHC and GGBN

We were pleased to attend the SPNHC and GGBN meetings last week in Berlin. We look forward to continuing the conversations with our many colleagues and other collections champions!

If you weren’t able to attend SPNHC, those sessions were recorded. Find them all on iDigBio’s site. David presented in the Collections for the Future session on Thursday afternoon and Eileen presented in the second DemoCamp session on Friday morning.

Our GGBN talks weren’t recorded, but we’ve uploaded the slides for David’s Thematic, Demand-driven Sampling: Economics of Three Strategies, his presentation for GGBN, and Scientific Collections, Food Security and Emerging Infectious Diseases, which he presented at SPNHC.  Eileen’s A Global Registry of Scientific Collections: Striking a Balance Between Disciplinary Detail and Interdisciplinary Discoverability presentation are also uploaded. They can also be found in GGBN’s document library. (If you would like an account, send a request to: library@ggbn.org).

The Botanist and the Digital Age

Fig.1. George Washington Carver
(Credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1906)

Last week, 25 specimens of fungi collected by the famed botanist and inventor George Washington Carver were discovered in the Wisconsin State Herbarium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born into slavery around 1864, Carver became one of the most prominent African-American scientists and is now well known for his research with peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans.