iDigInfo Projects
iDigBio
Since 2011, iDigBio has served as the US National Science Foundation’s National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections. “Digitization” in this context means the creation of digital data and media (e.g., digital images) about biodiversity specimens. These specimens include insects on pins, fish in jars, fossils in drawers, and plants on sheets and are critical to research that puts present day distribution in context and models the future of Earth’s biome. These collections can be found in such various institutional settings as museums, botanical gardens, universities, field stations, government research centers, and elsewhere.
iDigBio has historically been composed of five domains, with four at University of Florida and the fifth—the Digitization, Workforce Development, and Participatory Science Domain—at Florida State University’ Institute for Digital Information and Scientific Communication. FSU’s iDigBio activities focus on increasing the rate, scope, efficiency, quality, and downstream fitness-for-use of digital data creation about specimens and collecting events, identifying and building core data creation and management competencies among biodiversity collections staff, and building support for digitization, data management, and workforce development among biodiversity collections administrators to sustain the activities. The FSU iDigBio domain accomplishes its goals through leadership and participation in a mix of deliverables, including workshops, symposia, conferences, webinars, working groups, white papers, peer-reviewed papers, professional meeting talks and posters, professional organization liaisons, and online content.
iDigInfo Director Austin Mast is co-PI on the current iDigBio Phase 3 grant (2021–26; $20 million) with four co-PIs from UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History and UF’s Advanced Computing and Information System’s Laboratory, as well as important new collaborators from the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum. The grant supports graduate students, as well as three full-time staff at iDigInfo. For more information on the iDigBio Phase 3 grant, visit https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2027654
Digitization Academy
The Digitization Academy is a reformulation of the professional development offerings from iDigBio, packaging these into a set of complementary, recurring courses on high-value topics for those creating and using digital data about biodiversity. Since 2021, the academy has offered 12-hour courses, such as Introduction to Biodiversity Specimen Digitization, and 2-hour courses, such as Content Creation for Immersive Media focused on Biodiversity. Our core strategy involves combining three things in each course: (1) our systematic overview of the topic provides a foundation, (2) participants’ sharing animates the topic with motivation and nuance, and (3) an expert panel on the topic identifies the leading edge of what is possible. In 2025, the course catalog involves at seven offerings, including the popular Spanish-language version of our introductory course.
iDigInfo Workforce Development Manager with iDigBio, Kalina Jakymec, manages the Digitization Academy, and iDigInfo Digitization Resources Manager with iDigBio, Fritz Pichardo Marcano, teaches the Spanish-language version of courses. iDigInfo Director, Austin Mast, teaches in each of the English-language versions of courses. iDigInfo Application Developer, Robert Bruhn, maintains the Digitization Academy software.
WeDigBio
The Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio) project provides resources for biodiversity research collections to effectively and creatively engage their local communities and global internet users in digitization of specimens and associated content, especially during two annual WeDigBio events, with an emphasis on increasing the science literacy of participants, growing the variety of science contributors, and expanding the relevance of collections to solving humanity’s grand challenges. It leverages the easily understood, deeply historical biodiversity specimen collecting process, the visually compelling, data-laden specimens, the straightforward digitization activities, and the engaging stories of discovery enabled by the specimens and digital data to engage an ever-expanding group of public participants, collection professionals, educators, and others in activities that further biodiversity research, conservation, and management.
iDigInfo Director Austin Mast currently serves as Co-Chair of the WeDigBio Board and served as a founder of this collaboration that has included the Smithsonian Institution, the Australian Museum, the Paris National Museum of Natural History, and many other organizations. iDigInfo Application Developer Robert Bruhn maintains WeDigBio software, including the event dashboard. The first WeDigBio event was held in 2015.
BIOSPEX
BIOSPEX is a base camp for launching, advertising, and managing targeted efforts to digitize the world's 3 billion biodiversity research specimens in ways that involve the public. Such specimens include fish in jars, plants on sheets, fossils in drawers, insects on pins, and many other types. “Digitization” is a broad reference to creating digital data about the physical specimens and includes things like recording the what, when, where from the specimen label or describing the life stage of the specimen at time of collection. BIOSPEX enables you to package projects in one or a series of digitization expeditions, launch the expeditions at crowdsourcing tools, widely recruit others to participate, and layer resources on the experience to advance science literacy. In the end, you can download the new data for specimen curation, research, conservation, natural resource management, public policy, or other activities.
iDigInfo Director Austin Mast serves as project lead for BIOSPEX, and iDigInfo Application Developer Robert Bruhn maintains the BIOSPEX software.
Former iDigInfo Projects
Military Suicide Research Consortium
The Department of Defense, Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs) from the Defense Health Program Enhancement (DHPe) awarded a $17 million federal grant to Florida State University and the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center to establish the Department of Defense Military Suicide Research Consortium (MSRC). The consortium is the first of its kind to integrate DOD and civilian efforts in implementing a multidisciplinary research approach to suicide prevention.
iDigInfo represents Core B, the Information Management/Scientific Communications Core of the project. Core B has knowledge, information, and findings through a variety of methods appropriate for decision makers, practitioners, and others who are accountable for ensuring the mental health of military personnel. Directed by iDigInfo, the goals of Core B include a rapid response function so that queries from decision makers and others of the MSRC will be answered in an efficient and timely manner. Technical assistance and support for decision makers and others is an integral aspect of this MSRC function. This aspect of MSRC warehouses knowledge about suicidal behavior in general (gathered in part by Core C), so that military issues can be informed in a comprehensive manner.
Rapid Pandemic Response
The US National Science Foundation awarded iDigInfo Director Austin Mast a $200,000 grant from the Rapid Response Research funding mechanism to enhance data about the world’s 90,000+ horseshoe bat specimens. Horseshoe bats harbor a variety of coronaviruses—the closest viral relative to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic) discovered to-date was found in a horseshoe bat. The project is, among other things, mapping historical horseshoe bat collection locations and has found that about 28% of the records represent extensions of known species distributions. The project’s data and protocols are shared at Zenodo, and the latter will serve as a template for digital data enhancement during future crisis responses (e.g., in the face of an oil spill). The award is a collaboration with the Head of Biodiversity Informatics and Data Science at Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. It started July 1, 2020, and supported three Data Curators and staff time at iDigInfo. For more information on the grant, visit https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2033973. To hear more about the research, you can view Austin’s talk to the COVID Information Commons community at https://covidinfocommons.datascience.columbia.edu/content/meet-researchers
Morphbank
Morphbank :: Biological Imaging is a continuously growing database of images that scientists use for international collaboration, research and education. Images deposited in Morphbank :: Biological Imaging document a wide variety of research including: specimen-based research in comparative anatomy, morphological phylogenetics, taxonomy and related fields focused on increasing our knowledge about biodiversity. The project receives its main funding from the Biological Databases and Informatics program of the National Science Foundation.
Morphbank :: Biological Imaging was established in 1998 by a Swedish-Spanish-American group of entomologists and is currently housed at the School of Computational Science (SCS) at Florida State University. The project has grown immensely since its beginnings and presently includes a team of 15 biologists, computer scientists and information scientists who are working on developing the software. The project is dedicated to using open-source software and is a Fair Use Web Site. The software used in the current Morphbank :: Biological Imaging system includes PHP, ImageMagick, MySQL, Apache, Java, and JavaScript.
bioteà
Using RDF, bioteà aims to increase the connections between scientific documents. The RDF model makes extensive reuse of existing ontologies and semantic enrichment services. The model is then exposed over a SPARQL endpoint, which you can query from the project's website.
CFIIP
The Catastrophic Risk Finance and Insurance Information Portal provide researchers, policy makers, government officials, and practitioners with a comprehensive source of information on catastrophic risk financing. This site organizes content for academics, practitioners, and researchers throughout the world. Resources include academic and industry papers, academic journals, legal resources and databases, and can be searched by title, author, date published, organization, and subject. Resources can also be searched by using the Search function located at the top of each page.
iDigInfo maintains the repository content management system, and contributes to design of the interface.
Digital Libraries to School Libraries
Digital Libraries to School Libraries is a project whose aim is to explore ways in which school librarians can use digital open content to expand and enrich the school library's resource base and instructional support. This project uses the newest web-based technologies to help school librarians identify DL open content, integrate open content metadata into their OPACs, and help use open content for learning. Guided by the overarching question "How can school libraries support strong STEM achievement with digital library open content?" in this three-year exploratory Early Career Research project, the researcher will investigate a framework for school librarians' promotion of sustainable open content use in schools through the following research questions.
The Institute's Marcia Mardis heads this project.