Online queries

The collections at the herbarium BC of the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB) are computerized, georeferenced and digitized to be consulted online. Nowadays, 162,299 herbarium sheets and samples are available online. Most of the specimens have its country indication and more of the 75 % of them come from the Iberic Peninsula or Morocco. The available collections are the following ones (in bold, fully available collections):

These specimens are available in part or in full on three web portals: GBIF, JSTOR y BioExplora (in two modalities).

• GBIF is an international initiative with the goal to provide free and online open access to all available information on biodiversity in the world. This network acts only as a server of all records as long as the data remain under the control of the institution deciding what data and which geographical precision will be available to users.
• The herbarium BC collaborates in this network since 2006 every year does a new data export.
• These data are hosted at the Spanish GBIF server node using the IPT (Integrated Publishing Toolkit) platform clustered in two data sets, one for vascular plants and another for lichens.
• Data from the three collections are available at the GBIF national website or the GBIF international website. Data is licensed under Open Data Commons Attribution License.

• JSTOR is the biggest digitized type specimens database in the world, with almost 3 million images, and a place for international scientific research and collaboration.
• The herbarium BC participates thanks to two projects funded by the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, a non-profit organisation. Those projects were part of the GPI (Global Plants Initiative), an international initiative that pursued the creation of an online library for botanical academic resources. The herbarium BC took part in the API (African Plants Initiative) project during 2007 and 2008 and in the LAPI (Latin American Plants Initiative) project in 2010; both consisted in the digitalization of types or taxonomically interesting specimens and associated documentation from Africa and Latin America respectively.
• The 2,179 images obtained from these projects are available at the JSTOR web.
• In the same web pages 168 documents from the Cuatrecasas archive are also available.

• Open collections is an integrated app at the Bioexplora en site by the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona.
• This app lets you search and consult only in the registered and computerized specimens from the different Zoological, Geological and Botanical collections that are available at the Museu.
• Content is updated periodically, at the same time as GBIF is updated.

• Taxo & Map is an integrated app at the Bioexplora en site by the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona.
• It is designed for the immersion in the data of the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona collections and offers complementary query options to those offered in other sites.
• It allows the search of the same specimens that are found at GBIF but with a reversed strategy. First all information is visualized and from there, the user zooms in and out and moves around the geographical and taxonomical scope until the selection of the data that the user wants to observe or export.

• The catalogue of nomenclatural types is a search engine developed by the IBB to make part of the BC herbarium accessible to the public.
• The catalogue currently allows access to 40% of the 10,000 type sheets estimated to be preserved in the BC herbarium. Periodic updates to the catalogue are expected.
• The search engine allows you to search the specifications by genus, species, infraspecies, collector and country and, for each specification, provides information on the family, place of origin, exsiccata, etc., digitized images are obtained and the specifications are linked to the GBIF biodiversity database.