All posts tagged with crowdsourcing

Zooniverse unveils its latest project called Science Gossip which is an investigation into the making and communication of science in both the Victorian period and today. This project is born from a collaboration between an Arts and Humanities Research Council project in the UK, called ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ (ConSciCom) and the Missouri Botanical Garden who provided content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The publication of books and periodicals are key locations for knowledge about the natural world.

Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), The New York Botanical Garden’s The LuEsther T. Mertz Library, the most comprehensive botanical and horticultural library in the Americas, has recently cataloged all 58,000 items in its Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection.

Recent crowdsourcing initiatives are revolutionizing scientific research, allowing the public to help scientists and researchers document, identify, and better understand biodiversity. For example, the Atlas of Living Australia’s FieldData program allows anyone to contribute sightings, photos and observational data to help researchers and natural resource management groups collect and manage biodiversity data.

American Archives Month celebrates the importance of archives and the work of archivists as they seek to collect, organize, and make accessible unique materials from our nation’s history. The Smithsonian Field Book Project is an exciting example of such work, an effort across SI departments and divisions to increase accessibility to field book content. Field books are important because they are the primary source records of flora, fauna, and ecosystem biodiversity research.