Best practices for digitizing a wood slide collection: The Bailey-Wetmore Wood Collection of the Harvard University Herbaria

Abstract As herbaria move to digitize their collections, the question remains of how to efficiently digitize collections other than standard herbarium sheets, such as wood slide collections. Beginning in September 2018, the Harvard University Herbaria began a project to image and digitize the wood slides contained in the Bailey-Wetmore Wood Collection. The primary goal of this project was to produce images of the wood tissue that could be used for specimen-level research and to make them available on the internet for remote scholarship. A secondary goal was to establish best practices for digitizing and imaging a microscope slide collection of tissue sections. Due to the size of the wood slide collection (approximately 30,000 slides), a medical histology scanner and virtual microscopy software were used to image these slides. This article outlines the workflow used to create these images and compares the results with digital resources currently available for wood anatomy research. Prior to this project, the very little of the Bailey-Wetmore Wood Collection was cataloged digitally and none of it was imaged, which made access to this unique collection difficult. By imaging and digitizing 6,605 slides in the collection, this project has demonstrated how other institutions can make similar slide collections available to the broader scientific community.