Summary: Increasing user diversity is a key component of maintaining and expanding digital collections. Diverse users are more engaged, and engage in ways that are both novel and serendipitous - often creating uses for our data that the curators couldn't imagine. However, increasing our user base can also serve another goal - providing an entrance ramp for people who maintain views, locations, and life histories that are underrepresented in our ranks. Here my colleagues and I demonstrate how digital collections can help lower barriers to participation across multiple axes, including cost, location and disability status. Our goal in highlighting this is to show the broader impacts of our work, and how through helping people understand biological diversity we can help improve the diversity within our own community.

Presenter: Dr. Joshua Adam Drew from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, at Columbia University.