Monday 31 July 2017

Karoo Biogaps Project Needs Your Help

by Silvia Kirkman 

You can help the Karoo biogaps project by transcribing data from museum and herbaria collections using the online platform http://transcribe.sanbi.org/

Why do we need help transcribing? 

There are thousands of historical museum and herbaria specimens collected before the time of computers! The information in these specimen records is critical to understand previous distribution patterns of species, but the information is inaccessible if it remains in hard copy only. We need to digitise all museum and herbaria records so that scientists can analyse the data. Photographs of the specimen have been uploaded onto this website, but we need your help to type the data from the specimen label into the database. By doing this transcribing, you are helping to make species information as old as 1830 available to scientists and the general public!