History

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The Digital Imaging Center is a state-of-the-art facility designed specifically for digitizing NYBG’s 7.8 million herbarium specimens.  First opened in 2005, this 787-sq.-ft. studio space consists of ten camera workstations dedicated to digitally photographing herbarium sheets and other botanical collections preserved in archival packets, boxes, bags, or fluid.

Overseen by the Herbarium Digital Asset Manager, the Digital Imaging Center produces an average of 40,000 images per month, or 500,000 per year.  It is available for use by specimen cataloguing projects, staff or graduate student research projects, undergraduate internships, and Mertz Library digitization projects.

Equipment

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All camera workstations are equipped with a computer tethered to a full-frame Nikon or Canon digital SLR camera with 50mm macro or other high-quality lens mounted on a copy stand and positioned over a platform with a continuous lighting system.

Images are saved directly to workstation computer hard drives and to a centralized Storage Area Network (SAN) built upon NEC M110 Disk Arrays with 6TB disk drives presented via virtualized servers hosted on a Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Datacenter, built with redundancy at the Hyper-V level and with backup provided by a NEC HS8-5000 Storage Node.

For a complete list of NYBG equipment specifications, contact the Herbarium Digital Asset Manager (lmcmillin@nybg.org).