Use of globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) to link herbarium specimen records to physical specimens

With the advent of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program and related worldwide digitization initiatives, the rate of herbarium specimen digitization in the United States has expanded exponentially. As the number of electronic herbarium records proliferates, the importance of linking these records to the physical specimens they represent as well as to related records from other sources will intensify. Although a rich and diverse literature has developed over the past decade that addresses the use of specimen identifiers for facilitating linking across the internet, few implementable guidelines or recommended practices for herbaria have been advanced. Here we review this literature with the express purpose of distilling a specific set of recommendations especially tailored to herbarium specimen digitization, curation, and management. We argue that associating globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) with physical herbarium specimens and including these identifiers in all electronic records about those specimens is essential to effective digital data curation. We also address practical applications for ensuring these associations.