Hello TDWG and a special shout-out to TDWG'ers in New Zealand and greater Oceania,

Please help the BigDig organizing committee reach a worldwide audience with this call for papers. Deadline: June 30th, 2017.

WHAT is it? A one-day workshop held in conjunction with the 13^th IEEE International Conference on eScience (http://escience2017.org.nz/)

WHEN: 24—27 October 2017

WHERE: Auckland, New Zealand

The BigDig workshop will focus on high-throughput digitization, driven by the keen need to move the world’s physical collections into the digital realm where they are safer from the ravages of time, can be used by larger numbers of scientists and the public, and can contribute in new ways to the study of biodiversity. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Digitization technologies for high-throughput 2D and 3D capture of collection objects
* Instrumentation strategies and algorithms
* Specimen handling, label information capture, OCR, crowd-sourced label transcription, 3D reconstruction
* Digitization requirements, metadata, image and 3D fidelity, time and resource constraints, speed
* Workflows for high-throughput digitization of natural history collections
* Data management for large and perhaps distributed digital collections of such data
* Interface requirements, issues, and solutions both for scientific research and for public outreach to extremely large virtual collections
* Applications of the resulting data resource to potentially new science and approaches as evidenced by theoretical models, case studies, parallels with existing similar data resources 

Thank you for your part in extending the reach of the organizing committee with this call for papers. Deadline: June 30th, 2017.

With gratitude and in anticipation,

Debbie Paul, et al on the Program Committee