The struggle to share: experiences of revitalizing and digitizing a small scale herbarium
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Small herbaria have been recognized for the wealth of contributions to science held within their collections. Since the digitization of herbaria began, calls have been made to make small herbaria accessible through these efforts. However, various obstacles may prevent small herbaria from undertaking this work. In 2019, work began to revitalize and modernize the George F. Ledingham Herbarium at the University of Regina (approximately 70 000 specimens). The goals were to produce an electronic database, digitize the collection, make the data available through the online biodiversity platforms Canadensys and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and produce a herbarium-specific website. The initial focus has been on the Saskatchewan vascular plants, representing one-third of the herbarium’s accessions. To date, we have established a website, finished databasing the accessioned Saskatchewan vascular plant specimens, made the database available on the website, and completed 1700 scans. We are still working toward making our data available through online biodiversity platforms. Here, we share the positives and challenges that other small herbaria may face, detail approaches other small herbaria might take, and discuss the importance of digitizing and sharing herbaria collections through a freely accessible online platform.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it