The scope of the project is enabling digital access to almost 10'000 singular historic (16th-18th century) herbarium specimens at the Herbaria Basel, by updating and expanding the digital information associated with five partially digitized, important historic herbaria following standards laid out in Frick & Greeff (2021).

Meta-data for digital specimens will include all fields required for specimen filing and finding (physically, in the database, and online), such as collecting information (names, dates, administrative areas) and taxonomic information (determination, consistent name resolution, type status).

This project is important because it promotes digital accessibility to important specimens: Accessibility and conservation of research-relevant data are a core task of herbaria and are within the scope of SwissCollNet. Our project mobilizes the information of close to 10’000 singular historic specimens and presents them online, besides via our institutional internet-portal (herbarium.unibas.ch, in development), also via Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org) and within the timeframe of the project also via Global Plants on JSTOR (plants.jstor.org). All data will also be integrated in the Swiss Virtual Natural History Collection portal (in development) by meeting established Swiss-wide standards.