Museum/herbarium collection digitisation on iNaturalist, yes or no?

[danaleeling]

@cmcheatle

The site management has been clear that iNaturalist is not the best option as a general data aggregator or storage place for large scale collections.

@kueda

iNaturalist is a platform for helping to connect people to nature first, and a database second. If iNat caused these people to slow down for a second and pay attention to a non-human organism when they might not have otherwise, then these observations have value.

The core mission is to connect people with wild nature, digitizing existing collections does seem far from this emphasis on one individual interacting with nature in the wild. Given that group accounts are not officially sanctioned, and given the intended focus on an observer-identifier conversations about an observation, herbarium collection accounts would seem to be problematic. Herbarium/museum digitization projects perhaps belong in non-interactive accessible online databases akin to Plants of the World Online.