To all our Friends and Supporters,It's been an extraordinary few months since I got in touch, and I hope you and yours are all well.I wanted to provide a quick update on how your generous donations have helped to support the Herbaria digitisation project over the past few months, and when you will see the digitised specimens online.As you know, we received a large donation that started the digitisation of our early collections, and we had made good progress on this before the lockdown began. Our digital team, Ali and Kate, are now working from home, ploughing through the reservoir of digitised images capturing metadata, and data cleaning. We had hoped by now to have made these specimens available online, but that has been delayed somewhat by these rather unsual circumstances. We hope by summer to have a clearer idea about how we might return to the department, and when the legume samples can start to be digitised.The Herbaria's digitised collections will feature in the Botanic Gardens' project with Google Arts & Culture, due to launch sometime next month. This is a wonderful way to dive into a cultural institution, via virtual tours and also a rich visual tapestry of the collections. We will forward more information when this goes live, and you will hopefully see some of our more famous digitised samples online in all their glory.Thank you so much for your support for the Herbaria.Stephen

Just a quick update to say welcome to our new supporters, especially the Biology students who have kindly signed up to help raise awareness of the appeal.

We have just received the Gift Aid from the alumni donors who supported our mailing appeal in June, so we are now 43% of the way to our target. Can you help us get over 50% by the end of the week? That's £4500 in 52 hours - who's up for the challenge?

Please help us spread the word by liking and sharing our social media posts on:

Twitter: twitter.com/OxReach @OxReach

Facebook: facebook.com/OxReach

Instagram: instagram.com/oxford_crowdfunding

and don't forget to use your unique URL!

Many thanks,

Stephen

Thanks to you, and over 100 alumni who supported the herbaria following our mailing appeal last year, we are now 40% of the way to digitising all the legume specimens in the herbaria.

This will enable new discoveries to be made, such as the fossil roots that provided new evidence of plant root development during research undertaken by Professor Liam Dolan and researcher Sandy Hetherington.

It will provide new data for DPhil students such as Henry Hung, whose research explores how current and future climates relate to genetic and adaptive changes in Dalbergia rosewood trees in SE Asia, which have been the world’s most illegally trafficked product.

It will also enable researchers in other disciplines to search the collections for non-plant materials, such as a sample of henna that related to research by Dr Kate Bennett from the English faculty: https://www.plants.ox.ac.uk/article/digitisation-beyond-sciences.

Please follow us on social media - you can find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - to find out more about the collections, and how legumes are being used, and please do spread the word using your unique supporter URL.

If you have a story like Kate’s, or would like to provide a quote about why you think the digitised herbaria is important we would love to hear from you so we can share it! 

Thank you!