Dear orchid-growing friends, I'm going to use this opportunity to re-introduce myself to the list plus add some perspective to the slide digitization discussion.
Some of the "old-timers" here may remember me from my more active days when I was still living in Michigan, where I grew in two successive greenhouses and under lights and was an active orchid society member in Michiana, Dunes-Kalamazoo and Greater Lansing. The vagaries of life and the disaster of the Michigan economy led me to move to Seattle, where I lived for a year and a half and acquired a new (portable greenhouse). A new job took me to San Bernardino, CA. A lot of moving and a lot of new environments to master led to a great reduction in the size of my orchid collection sadly. Southern California offers many new opportunities to learn how to grow orchids all over again, where too much light is more common than too little, and many varieties (like Cymbidiums) do best outside year around! But it is from the perspective of my new job that I am writing today. I'm a librarian, and I finally got a job as a librarian in a botany library, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden Research Library. We have nearly 50,000 bound volumes and 750 current periodical subscriptions (and publish our own, Aliso), making RSA one of the most significant botany libraries in the Western U.S. (the Garden also has over a million herbarium specimens, but that's another story). There are many tasks to accomplish in this new position, not the least of which is dealing with digital objects (like digitized slides) and associated metadata (what's on them). One of our emeritus researchers, Robert Thorne, has given the Garden his lifetime collection of slides (not dissimilar to the one that I imagine Jim Asher had). We estimate that this is more than 10,000 slides. And we have begun to digitize them. It was through examining this collection that I became more fully aware of how important the slides, the data on them, and the associated field notebooks are to the legacy of any active field botanist. The slides themselves are an invaluable resource not only of individual species, but also the ecosystems that they are found in sometimes over a historical time-period. In the past, these collections were found in a single place, and I'm not sure what happened to them after the scientist was gone or didn't need them anymore. This is where an institutional response, I believe, is critical. That botanical institutions (including their libraries) be involved in preserving and digitizing these collections (and here I mean a commitment to permanent preservation as well as making them available via the Internet for study). It is my fervent hope that Jim Asher's collection find a home in such a place. In the days and weeks ahead, I will be working not only on our own Garden's policies and practices around digital objects, including those created by present and past employees, but will also be in conversation with my colleagues in the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries and our European counterpart to discuss what has been done and what needs to be done to ensure that this valuable scientific data does not disappear from use by the scientific community. Since this is getting long, I'm going to write a followup on the status of digitized book and periodical collections, including orchids. Sincerely, Harvey Brenneise Head Librarian Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden Research Library Claremont, CA _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
