As part of the work of the OpenUp! Project, scans of labels from plant collections made by Jimmy Ratter are now available online at http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/Ratter_labels/.

Throughout his career Jimmy has kept copies of his labels, providing a valuable resource which up until now was only visible on the individual herbarium specimen and therefore only available to researchers via loans of these specimens.

During the work of the OpenUp! Project these labels were scanned and then passed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The output from the OCR was sorted to allow it to be added to the Collection Books table of the institutional database and on into the Specimens table if Edinburgh (E) held the specimen thus adding information which we didn’t previously have in a searchable format.

To make more use of the scans, the sheets were turned into PDF’s and indexed by the 1000’s and this is the format that is available online.

Robyn Drinkwater – OpenUp Project Officer.