The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

By the numbers

The staff of the Department of Botany is making a strong push to make the U.S. National Herbarium’s collection of over 5 million specimens available online. The Botany Specimen Catalog is available at https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=2. During the current pandemic with staff sequestered in their homes, work continues to accomplish the goals of a fully accessible catalog of specimens. Notable numbers and figures below.

13

The number of collections and information technology staff and contractors from the Botany Department dedicated to cleaning up catalog records.

560,000

The number of EMu specimen records corrected and amended during the first three months of the pandemic.

260,000

The number of new specimen images added to museum’s database since March 2020.

4,000

The approximate daily average number of public queries to the Botany Specimen Catalog during the spring months of 2020.