The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is delighted to announce that a new collection – The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants – has been published in the Repository by National Botanic Gardens of Ireland.
The National Herbarium of Ireland in Glasnevin, Dublin contains a collection of more than half a million dried and documented plant specimens from Ireland and the rest of the world. The collections and associated literature and documentation act as a central repository of information relating to the distribution and taxonomy of the flora of Ireland.
The complete collection contains some 20,000 samples of plant products, including fruits, seeds, wood, fibres, plant extracts, and artefacts. At present, the National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection in the DRI Repository has digitally preserved over 5,000 images containing scaled photographs of herbarium specimens collected in Ireland.
The National Herbarium of Ireland serves as a reference centre, a documentation facility, a data storehouse and a research institution for the study of Irish and international botany. Associated with the herbarium is the library, with extensive archives relating to the history of horticulture in Ireland, and the flora of Ireland.
This collaboration between the Herbarium and DRI marks their third collection ingested into the Repository, including: A Digital Botanical Archive of James Ponsonby Brunker (1885–1970): Plants Collected at the Guinness Brewery and A Digital Botanical Archive of Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865-1953): Digitisation of Praeger’s Plant Specimens at the National Herbarium of Ireland. Taken together, over 6,000+ objects have thus far been ingested into the DRI Repository.
Of these ingests, Dr. Colin Kelleher, Taxonomist & Keeper of the Herbarium said:
“Herbarium specimens capture a moment in time and hold data on plant-environment interactions as well as the human story of their discovery. The biological, historical and cultural data from these specimens will be a huge resource for plant conservation and for historians of the natural sciences.”
The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants can now be viewed in full in the Repository.
DRI are delighted to include this valuable collection in the Repository. Similar collections in the Repository include: the Clare Memories ‘Traditional Farming and Nature’ collection, Farmers and Relational Sustainability, and the Dún Ailinne 1968-1975 Excavation Archive.
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