[Andrew C. Sanders]

Dean: the Sonoma State Herbarium does not exist, at least according to the Consortium database.

It does exist, but I don't know how active they are these days. Richard Whitkus is in charge and some years ago he set out to database their herbarium, and we provided him with a copy of the UCR database format. He has little support, and a heavy teaching load, so I don't know how far the effort has gone. Probably not far: they are not yet participants in CCH yet.

Dean: In order to get your material entered, you, YOU and anyone else you can conscript, are the only mechanism to collect, ID, label, mount, data capture and transmit records...


Not strictly true. Here at UCR, for example, we will ID, label, mount, data capture and transmit records to CCH for people. The only thing we won't usually do is collect for people -- and sometimes I'll do that, if it's an interesting place, or something. Well, people also have to give us good clear field notes so that we can process their collections. That's an absolute. We'd love it if people would make their own labels, and we encourage that wherever possible -- but if label preparation is a barrier to getting collections made, we'll handle that. We've made LITERALLY 10s of thousands of labels (maybe 100k) for collections made by consultants, agency biologists, and random plant enthusiasts. I think some other herbaria will help this way too. SD, for example, has an online labeling system for specimens that are going to them.