IIIF Herbaria Mundi
As mentioned above, one of the key things that botanists do is to compare herbarium specimens within and between herbaria. From the researchers perspective it would be ideal if all the specimens existed in a single herbarium, the one they were in. IIIF should allow this to happen, at least virtually, and Herbaria Mundi (World Herbarium) was set up as a demonstration of what such a system might look like.
Implementation
The system consists of an Apache Solr index of six hundred thousand specimens from RBGE and BGBM as well as a few stored in Zenodo. The index was built by polling the CETAF IDs for each specimen, indexing the associated specimen data and generating a thumbnail image from the IIIF end point for the specimen. Only specimens with associated IIIF Manifests were included in the index.
Users can log into the system using their ORCID IDs. They can then search and browse the specimens as if this were a catalogue of a single herbarium (Figure 13). Tools allow the specimens to be tagged and determined to species according to the current World Flora Online taxonomy and to compare sets of specimens side by side. The higher resolution images for zoom are all called live from the host institutions.
