Brown University

The Brown University Herbarium will partner with the Brown University Library to plan and develop the prototype of a tool to help the public access digitized herbarium specimens in more meaningful ways. The planning process will begin with background research to identify best practices for collections interfaces and existing efforts to incorporate herbarium collections into biology education. The project team will organize a meeting of herbarium professionals, museum education specialists, biology instructors, data visualization experts and designers/administrators of existing search interfaces. This group of diverse professionals will provide information and perspectives on using digitized images and collections interfaces to serve non-expert audiences. The project will result in a user interface specification, which will define how the application will look and how users will interact with it, and an implementation specification, defining how the application will work and be built.