An Introduction to the Botanical Type Specimen Register

ter as one of the charter projects. These projects
are controlled by the respective departments, but
the overall program is coordinated and managed
by James F. Mello, Assistant Director.
The response to the several requests for participa-
tion during the pilot phase was excellent, showing
general interest among botanists and convincing
Hale and others at the Smithsonian of the potential
value of a type-specimen register and of the bo-
tanical community’s willingness to collaborate to
the fullest extent possible in creating a register
along the lines conceived. From the preliminary
experiments much was learned about the logistical
problems and the costs and manpower requirements
of network data banking. The Smithsonian neces-
sarily is concentrating present operations on its own
type collections ot about 65,000 specimens. The
system is designed, however, to accept data from
any institution at any time, and as long as the
inflow remains on a small scale, data from other
institutions can be added to the central file by the
paresent staff more or less as they are received. It
is hoped that as interest in collaboration grows
support commensurate to the interest will be forth-
coming both for the central operation and for
participating institutions.
The second part of this paper represents the first
published installment of the Type Register. It is
a provisional union catalog of the type specimens
of the genus Carex on deposit in ten major Ameri-
can herbaria (see “Contributing Institutions”) and
a concrete example of cooperative data banking.
In FY-72, the year that ended on 30 June 1972,
the Type Register project finally was put on a solid
footing. Midway through this year it was possible
for the first time in the four-year history of the
project to staff adequately by employing three full-
time persons (two assistant editors and a data con-
version operator) and also to have adequate funds
to process regularly. Prior to January 1970, the
pilot project was carried on intermittently as funds
were available by one to three part-time employees,
and from January 1970 to December 1971 the proj-
ect advanced on a more or less continuous, opera-
tional basis with the assistance of one, two, and
occasionally three full-time persons, the number
depending again on available money. During the
pilot effort, the computer analysis, programming,
and file processing were done on a part-time basis,
as needed, by personnel of the Smithsonian Infor-
ShIITHSOSIAN COSTRIBUTIOSS TO BOTANY
mation Systems Division, and since the project has
become operational this work has been performed
on a similar basis by FNA personnel so as to keep
the Type Register system compatible with the FNA
system.
From the beginning Hale planned for the in-
clusion of data from an indefinite and constantly
growing number of other institutions and actively
sought such collaboration. In one test of the feasi-
bility of multi-institutional input, he distributed
a computer-printed set of 52 cards, representing a
card catalog of the National Herbarium’s complete
type holdings in the genus Mimulus (Scrophu-
lariaceae), to each of 50 large herbaria in the
United States and abroad and solicited their co-
operation in providing similar data from their own
type collections, if any, of Mimulus. A second ma-
jor test involved sending a computer-printed card
catalog of the National Herbarium’s complete type
holdings in the family Lamiaceae (Labiatae) to the
University of California, Los Angeles, where Carl
Epling’s extensive t) pe collections in this family are
deposited, and later to the Missouri Botanical Gar-
den and the New York Botanical Garden. All three
institutions cooperated in providing data from
their own collections of types in this family. The
latter two institutions continued thereafter to col-
laborate as much as possible on other taxonomic
groups, and, apart from the Smithsonian itself,
they have been the institutions with the greatest
involvement in the Type Register project.
Certainly, no claim to completeness can be made
for a catalog that concerns a single genus and only
one percent (10/1000) of the world’s public insti-
tutional herbaria (Shetler, 1969). “Usefulness” is
the pragmatic criterion for compilation and pub-
lication of the Type Register, however, and useful-
ness is dependent on critical mass, not absolute
coverage. Clearly it is unrealistic to think that the
Type Register could ever achieve absolute com-
pleteness, registering all type specimens for all pub-
lished taxa in all of the world’s herbaria, and the
Register has not been conceived on this false prem-
ise. The Register is being created on the assump-
tion that some information is better than no
information and that a catalog of ten type collec-
tions is more useful than a catalog of one type
collection. Although it must be admitted that the
coverage is very uneven among the ten herbaria
contributing to the Carex Catalog, for example,