Portail de saisie participative

The Louis-Marie Herbarium is the largest university herbarium in Canada. With nearly 800,000 specimens within its walls, the task of digitizing this collection is monumental.

The goal in digitizating the collection is to facilitate management and research in the collection, but above all, it is to make the biodiversity data from the collection more accessible to researchers and the general public.

Thanks to the contribution of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science, the Herbarium was able to set up a crowdsourcing plateform to help with specimen digitization.

Participants are presented with images of specimens from the collection where label information, such as species' name, location, collectors and date of collection, needs to be transcribed. Deciphering the labels' information (manuscripted or typed) and is often beyond the limits of optical character recognition (OCR) at this time and that's why we need your help. We hope that this new crowdsourcing plateform will increase the rate of digitization at the Louis-Marie Herbarium.

Exemple du portail de saisie

This task can be done anywhere on the planet, as long as you have access to a computer and the Internet to access the computing platform.

A starter guide (PDF) will be provided when you register. In addition, a contact person will be able to help if you have questions during transcription. No data entry is final, you will be able to go back on your entries if you wish to correct some information at a later time.

Biodiversity data from the Louis-Marie Herbarium is published via HERCUL on this website. It's also deposited on several biodiversity data aggregators such as Canadensys, GBIF, the North-American Herbaria Consortium of lichens and bryophytes and iDigBio.

For more information, or if you are interested in participating in this major project:

Kim DAMBOISE
Phone 418.656.2131 ext. 406232
E-mail: kim.damboise@herbier.ulaval.ca