Digitalization

The past ten years we have been working on the electronic accessibility of our collections. For this purpose our collections have been entered in a herbarium database. We use Brahms. Using Brahms we administrate all curational tasks. Next to curation, our database is a powerful research tool for e.g. biodiversity assessments and preparing checklists. We also use this database to distribute the knowledge kept in our herbarium over the world. All types in our collection have already been entered in the database and include also a digital photo of the sheet. These collections, including their photo's can be assessed using the internet as part of the complete online databases of Wageningen, Utrecht and Leiden which available on the internet as one of the database groups presented by Brahms On Line. Not all fields can be consulted, but the most important ones are available at the moment.

Most digitised collections concern plants from Gabon; together with Missouri Botanical Garden we have databased 95% of all collections from Gabon that are available worldwide. We are currently entering all collections we hold from West- and Central Africa and those of Ethiopia. The top ten of collections per country present in our database after Gabon (ranking high to low) is: Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Benin, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, Congo (Kinshasa), Ghana, Madagascar and Sierra Leone.