Keep it searchable

The project ‘Virtual Guide to the Flora of Mongolia – Plant Database as Practical Approach’ was often asked: Why did you take the effort and typed in all that metadata? Don’t you think it is just enough to have the metadata on the digitized herbarium sheet?

Here are the TOP 3 of our answers:

  1. Because we could do it (and the list import tool helped us a lot).
  2. Because we aimed for a virtual approach to the flora that could be explore in many categories such as: who has collected this record? Who has determined it? Who revised it? Which herbaria does it come from? What habitat did the plant grow in? Was the plant flowering resp. fruiting?
  3. Because it was less effort to enter the metadata before resp. while scanning herbarium sheet than entering the metadata afterwards.

But you are right: the older the herbarium specimens, the less metadata were we able to enter.

text by: U. Najmi