Digitization Workshop and Best Practices Development Session for the Texas Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria (TORCH) Texas Tech University, 8-10 April 2011

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A 3-day meeting, digitization workshop, and best practices session will be held from 8 to 10 April 2011 for 36 curators of plant research collections (herbaria) throughout Texas and Oklahoma. This event will strengthen operational infrastructure within the TORCH (Texas Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria) collections network and will train herbarium curators in digitization methods and cybertechnologies. Three primary outcomes are anticipated from this event: 1) Enhancement of the organizational functionality of TORCH to coordinate digitization efforts among regional herbaria, 2) Hands-on learning among participating curators and students in biodiversity informatics tools, digitization techniques, and national initiatives involving data sharing and imaging of natural history collections, and 3) Development of best practice standards for the TORCH community. This workshop will prepare herbarium curators to collaborate and function as a regional node for national biological collections digitization initiatives.Workshop attendance supported by travel stipends is a necessary incentive to ensure sufficient input from regional curators and graduate students, thus engendering maximum support for and commitment to future TORCH activities. Development of a collaborative management plan and work strategy for herbarium digitization and data mobilization is imperative so that TORCH may contribute to federal initiatives such as the U.S. Biological Collections Resource/ Network Integrated Collections Alliance. The planned digitization and sharing of data contained in the 3.5 million herbarium specimens in Texas and Oklahoma will increase substantially the synthetic value of these data for biologists, ecologists, resource managers, and policy makers at the national and international level.