online handwriting identification resource

[Alexander Krings]

Dear All,

As the issue just came up on the HERBARIA list-serve, I thought I’d take
the opportunity to go ahead and make an announcement here.  Folks working
on typification issues and other historical research, may be interested in
a new online handwriting identification resource.  The herbaria of NCSC,
NY, and CHARL have been working in collaboration for about a year or so in
developing an online database of handwriting samples.  The public portion
of the website allows users to search or browse by collector name.
Additional information that may be associated for each collector includes
multiple images of handwriting, the context of the handwriting sample
(e.g., a herbarium sheet), the pages the collector appears in TL2, years
of birth/death, and a biosketch if available.  In some cases, we linked to
the Harvard maintained Botanical Collectors database when no biosketch was
immediately available.  The administrative portion of the website allows
curators worldwide to add additional collectors and handwriting images
once given administrative access.  The uploading process is very simple –
just filling in forms online and submitting.  Images can be stored locally
or on the NCSC server.  Our thought was that curators really know the
idiosyncracies of those represented in their collections the best and thus
building a database with distributed access would be a more efficient way
of gathering all this knowledge than a single person traveling to various
herbaria.  Our site is a work in progress, but we invite you to take a
look.  It can be found at:

http://chiro.ncsu.edu

We welcome folks interested in collaborating with us.  If you are
interested, please let me know and I can provide access to the
administrative portion of the website and more detail on how to upload
additional samples.  We will of course update the website to list the name
of all collaborators.  We also do not anticipate the site to be static in
its present form and welcome any thoughts on modifications and
improvements that would serve us all better.

If I can provide any additional information, please let me know.  I am
also planning on being at the Natural Science Collections Alliance meeting
in D.C. in late May, if anyone is interested in discussing this more in
person.

Kind regards,

Alexander

_______________________
Alexander Krings
Curator (NCSC) & Editor (Vulpia)
Herbarium, Department of Botany
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7612

Tel:919.515.2700
Fax:919.515.3436
Alexander_Krings at ncsu.edu