Processing and Digitizing a Non-Standard Herbarium Collection: a Cautionary Tale about Research Value

Many private and non-standard natural history collections have been discarded or denied inclusion in herbaria due to a lack of precise documentation or unusual preservation methods. This exclusion is often enabled by limited capacity for special projects and a lack of expertise or paid staff within herbaria to process such materials. As a result, despite an overall increase in digitized specimen data through time, valuable information remains omitted from these biodiversity datasets which may be lost forever, unless strategies to incorporate them are developed. Using one non-standard collection as a case study, we demonstrate how curators might assess, process and digitize such collections, making them accessible to a wider audience, while preserving their original ‘character’. Through this example, we review a few ways to quantify research value within these types of collections, highlighting rare and endangered species, as well as extensions to geographic ranges or temporal coverage of otherwise known populations. We show that rather than discarding these specimens, with careful attention to assessment and processing, they can be efficiently cataloged and made usable by researchers, while maintaining the integrity of the collector’s 'personality’ and the unique story behind each collection.