The precious historical collection of fibres in Meise Botanic Garden, with over 500 specimens in old hand-blown glass jars, was rehabilitated in 2017. Most of the specimens date back to the second half of the 19th century, a period of technological revolution. The rehabilitation retraces the industrious search for every possible raw material provided by nature at that time. The result is astonishing, not only regarding the origin and quality of the preserved material, its label information and its accompanying manuscripts, but also because of the extremely wide range of fibre species and their processing.Noted collectors enriching our collections were, inter alios, the Josephite Brother Bernardin of Melle (Belgium), Carl von Martius and his brother Theodor Martius of Erlangen (Germany) and Henri Van Heurck of Antwerp (Belgium). Famous museums and botanic gardens such as the Museum of French Colonies in Paris (France) and the Experimental Garden in Eala (Democratic Republic of the Congo DRC) were also important suppliers. Samples originate from all over the world with strong representation from India, the DRC and Brazil.The nature of the fibres in the collection is very diverse and ranges from stem, bark and leaf fibres to husk fibres and seed hairs. Some of them have been processed into bundles and braids, beaten bark, spun thread and twined rope, as well as rough or organza-like fabrics. Even plant pith, pulp and paper are included, next to silkworm silk and mineral tremolite (a form of asbestos).Not only are familiar plant fibres such as cotton, sisal, ramie, coir, flax and jute present, but also Congo jute, Cuban bast, lacebark, piassava, esparto, fern wool, fibres of linden, sunflower, banana and pineapple, next to different types of paper and bark cloth. More than a hundred genera appear. Dominant families in terms of specimen numbers are Malvaceae (including Tiliaceae), Liliaceae (including Agavaceae), Palmae, Urticaceae, Bombacaceae, Musaceae and Gramineae.This upgraded collection exhibits an unexpected data diversity and consequently offers multitudinous possibilities for innovative research. One of our mission statements is undoubtedly: safeguarding historical collections for the future.

Globally there are a number of citizen science portals to support digitisation of biodiversity collections. Digitisation not only involves imaging of the specimen itself, but also includes the digital transcription of label and ledger data, georeferencing and linking to other digital resources. Making use of the skills and enthusiasm of volunteers is potentially a good way to reduce the great backlog of specimens to be digitised.These citizen science portals engage the public and are liberating data that would otherwise remain on paper. There is also considerable scope for expansion into other countries and languages. Therefore, should we continue to expand? Volunteers give their time for free, but the creation and maintenance of the platform is not without costs. Given a finite budget, what can you get for your money? How does the quality compare with other methods? Is crowdsourcing of label transcription faster, better and cheaper than other forms of transcription system?We will summarize the use of volunteer transcription from our own experience and the reports of other projects. We will make our evaluation based on the costs, speed and quality of the systems and reach conclusions on why you should or should not use this method.

Specimen labels are written in numerous languages and accurate interpretation requires local knowledge of place names, vernacular names and people’s names. In many countries more than one language is in common usage. Belgium, for example, has three official languages. Crowdsourcing has helped many collections digitize their labels and generates useful data for science. Furthermore, direct engagement of the public with a herbarium increases the collection’s visibility and potentially reinforces a sense of common ownership. For these reasons we built DoeDat, a multilingual crowdsourcing platform forked from Digivol of the Australian Museum (Figs 1, 2). Some of the useful features we inherited from Digivol include a georeferencing tool, configurable templates, simple project management and individual institutional branding.Running a multilingual website does increase the work needed to setup and manage projects, but we hope to gain from the broader engagement we can attract. Currently, we are focusing our work on Belgian collections were Dutch and French are the primary languages, but in the future we may expand our languages when we work on our international collections. We also hope that we can eventually merge our code with that of Digivol, so that we can both benefit from each other's developments.

Many, if not most, countries have several official or widely used languages. And most, if not all, of these countries have herbaria. Furthermore, specimens have been exchanged between herbaria from many countries, so herbaria are often polylingual collections. It is therefore useful to have label transcription systems that can attract users proficient in a wide variety of languages. Belgium is a typical polylingual country at the boundary between the Romance and Franconian languages (French, Dutch & German). Yet, currently there are few non-English transcription platforms for citizen science. This is why in Belgium we built DoeDat, from the Digivol system of the Atlas of Living Australia.We will be demonstrating DoeDat and its multilingual features. We will explain how we enter translations, both for the user interface and for the dynamic parts of the website. We will share our experiences of running a multilingual site and the challenges it brings. Translating and running such a website requires skilled personnel and patience. However, our experience has been positive and the number and quality of our volunteer transcriptions has been rewarding. We look forward to the further use of DoeDat to transcribe data in many other languages. There are no reasons anymore to exclude willing volunteers in any language.

There are many ways to capture data from herbarium specimen labels. Here we compare the results of in-house verses out-sourced data transcription with the aim of evaluating the pros and cons of each approach and guiding future projects that want to do the same.In 2014 Meise Botanic Garden (BR) embarked on a mass digitization project. We digitally imaged of some 1.2 million herbarium specimens from our African and Belgian Herbaria. The minimal data for a third of these images was transcribed in-house, while the remainder was out-sourced to a commercial company. The minimal data comprised the fields: specimen’s herbarium location, barcode, filing name, family, collector, collector number, country code and phytoregion (for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda & Burundi). The out-sourced data capture consisted of three types:additional label information for central African specimens having minimal data;complete data for the remaining African specimens; and,species filing name information for African and Belgian specimens without minimal data. As part of the preparation for out-sourcing, a strict protocol had to be established as to the criteria for acceptable data quality levels.Also, the creation of several lookup tables for data entry was necessary to improve data quality. During the start-up phase all the data were checked, feedback given, compromises made and the protocol amended. After this phase, an agreed upon subsample was quality controlled. If the error score exceeded the agreed level, the batch was returned for retyping. The data had three quality control checks during the process, by the data capturers, the contractor’s project managers and ourselves.Data quality was analysed and compared in-house versus out-sourced modes of data capture. The error rate by our staff versus the external company was comparable. The types of error that occurred were often linked to the specific field in question. These errors include problems of interpretation, legibility, foreign languages, typographic errors, etc. A significant amount of data cleaning and post-capture processing was required prior to import into our database, despite the data being of good quality according to protocol (error < 1%). By improving the workflow and field definitions a notable improvement could be made in the “data cleaning” phase.The initial motivation for capturing some data in-house was financial. However, after analysis, this may not have been the most cost effective approach. Many lessons have been learned from this first mass digitisation project that will implemented in similar projects in the future.

The botanicalcollections.be website (http://www.botanicalcollections.be) is the culmination of the three year Digitale Ontsluiting Erfgoedcollecties (DOE!) project. Over this period we have digitally imaged 1.2 million African and Belgian herbarium specimens and much of their label data. All these data are freely available on our new virtual herbarium www.botanicalcollections.be. For this we have to thank a generous grant from the Flemish Government.The site was officially launched on the 23rd March, 2018, at the Fourth Annual Meeting of Plant Ecology and Evolution held at Bouchout Castle in Meise Botanic Garden (https://sites.google.com/plantentuinmeise.be/ampee4/).Before developing the website we conducted a user requirements analysis (Vissers et al. 2017. These requirements formed the basis for development from initial design to the finished product. Lots of features were incorporated to make the site as user-friendly and usable as possible; persistent URIs, zoomable and downloadable images and access to data. Each specimen can be annotated and is available in a machine readable format.The goal of the botanicalcollections.be website is not only to make digitized specimens from the Botanic Garden available, but also to centralize and display the herbarium specimens from other Belgian herbaria. A cooperation agreement will make collaboration easy and transparent.The benefits to herbaria of participating in this virtual herbarium include greater publicity, the ability to show how their specimens contribute to overall knowledge, and a mechanism for identifying where to focus future collecting efforts, all of which help validate their worth to institutional administrators. In addition, such cooperation helps build professional relationships who, because of disparate interests and obligations, might not normally connect with each other.