Small Collections Grant

The work will be mainly performed by the herbarium technician Dr. Laura Vivona, who has a permanent position at the University of Firenze. Dr. Vivona has a long experience and a deep knowledge of the Herbarium collections in FIAF. She will be assisted by other selected persons, mainly Master Degree students provisionally employed for this task. The work will be done under the supervision of Prof. F. Selvi, Curator and Responsible of FIAF. Each specimen will be first checked for identity and conservation status. Then, all collection details in the label will be written in the electronic DB (File Maker Pro or Excel). A barcode number will be generated and assigned to each specimen, attaching the label to the herbarium sheet. For this purpose we can use a Thermal label printer GoDEX RT200 that is already available but still not in use. In addition, all “original material” specimens potentially useful for typification purposes will be identified, scanned and digitized. The same will be done for all specimens of Boraginaceae family now kept in the separate collection FIAF-HB, many of which have been used and referred to in scientific publications by F. Selvi and associates. Scanning will be performed with a high resolution flat-bed scan device to be purchased for this project. Ideally a HerbScan system will be used for this purpose. If not available, an alternative system will be used.