Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio)

About Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio)

Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) is the United States’ national coordinating center for enabling and facilitating natural history collections digitization, including specimen imaging and other media representations, as well as transcription of specimen-related textual data, georeferencing and more. iDigBio was initially funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advancing the Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, a 10-year initiative launched in 2011. Its major goal is to catalyze excellence in digitization, mobilization, and usage of data about the roughly 1 billion biodiversity specimens (e.g., fossils in drawers, insects on pins, fish and reptiles in jars, birds and mammals in trays, plants on sheets) curated in the 1,591 known U.S. biodiversity collections for research and education. iDigBio's projects now involve 926 collections and have led to the digitization of 40% of US specimens and over 2,000 scientific publications. 

Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) and RDA

A primary goal of iDigBio is to generate, mobilize, and serve digital biodiversity data for use in research. It is the major aggregator of such data in the U.S. Over the past few years, it has developed strong international and global relationships with other leading national, continental, and global aggregators in the interest of data and technology transfer. It has fostered data use globally through conferences and workshops and is dedicated to open data and biodiversity research. iDigBio envisions a strong collaborative relationship between it and RDA to be critical to its mission.