Hi Everyone and welcome to iDigBio. That's Integrated Digitized Biodiversity Collections, just to relieve your curiosity about that particular acronym. My name is Debbie Paul and here at iDigInfo, several staff members from iDigInfo, including myself, are excited to be a part of iDigBio. We're facilitating the nation's effort to get non-federal natural history museum collection specimen data out of millions of drawers, cabinets, jars and boxes and into a national resource, a cloud-based NoSQL database built with open source software. We anticipate a billion specimen records and accompanying images in ten years integrated from hundreds of museum providers. Our latest video: Digitizing Biological Collections - The iDigBio Project elegantly describes the breadth and depth of this project. Three of our major goals include: 1) gathering data to increase efficiency and speed of digitization, 2) discover and disseminate the most effective digitization practices to the organizations and 3) create a database populated with fit-for-use data for the public and researchers too. Check back for more posts soon about work going on in various facets of this project like data standards, data-mapping, ontology development, optical character recognition software, georeferencing, public participation in science and more.