The Ellen Browning Scripps Herbarium Collection — containing nearly 5,000 dried seaweed specimens — was recently published in the Library’s Digital Collections repository. This collection is the result of a close collaboration that began in 2024 with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Smith Lab and serves as a model for how the Library’s research data curation team can build digital collections that meet the complex needs of campus researchers.
To begin, Library curators met with project leads, postdoctoral scholar Adi Khen and marine ecologist Jennifer Smith, to discuss how best to preserve the rich metadata they were collecting for each specimen—including taxonomic details, collection locations, collectors, and species determiners—and how to transform that data for optimal discovery and reuse in the Library’s repository. We reviewed sample records, provided feedback to better align their metadata practices with our repository’s model, and proposed an approach to mapping and displaying the information in an intuitive way.
When the Smith Lab shared nearly 5,000 images and associated metadata in August 2025, our team began the process of structuring and normalizing the data to prepare it for repository ingest. The result is a richly detailed digital collection that supports both research and teaching in marine biology.
This work builds on years of effort by the Smith Lab team. As UC San Diego Today notes, “Since 2023, researchers and volunteers from the Smith Lab have been working together to curate and digitize seaweed pressings representing over 300 different species of native and non-native seaweeds from Southern California that make up the collection.” For more information about this research, visit the Smith Lab website or contact Jennifer Smith or Adi Khen.
Watch a short video featuring Adi Khen speaking about the importance of preserving seaweed and specimen collection and preservation:
Interested in Learning More?
The Library provides the following resources:
Biosis Citation Index (BCI) is one of our premier databases for life sciences research, indexing more 5,700 journals across the biological sciences and related disciplines. As part of the Web of Science platform, BCI has many of the same interface features and strengths: an straightforward search interface; the ability to locate related based on an article’s cited references, as well as articles that have subsequently cited that article; access to Journal Citation Reports for impact factors and other metrics; and easy integration with EndNote. However, BCI also includes some unique indexing to enhance greater discovery of life sciences articles not available in Web of Science, including taxonomic information, chemical and sequence data, and some information on methods and equipment.
Earth, Atmospheric & Aquatic Science Collection is an essential resource for anyone studying or conducting research on our air, water and land environments. It indexes peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, magazines, conference proceedings, technical reports and government publications, with many titles available full-text through the Earth, Atmospheric, & Aquatic Science Database. This collection also includes 1) Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts, which covers all aspects of marine, freshwater and brackish water regions and environments, the science as well as the sociological, legal and policy aspects; and 2) Meteorological & Geoastrophysical Abstracts, which indexes the scholarly and technical literature on meteorology, climatology, atmospheric chemistry and physics, astrophysics, hydrology, glaciology and physical oceanography.
Learn more about connecting to e-resources.
Data Curation at the Library
For guidance on depositing your data in a repository, help creating a digital object identifier or (DOI) for your research outputs, the Library’s Research Impact program is here to help. Contact us at Research-Data-Curation@ucsd.edu.