Connecting floras and herbaria before 1850 – challenges and lessons learned in digital history of biodiversity

Floras and herbaria are particularly valuable sources both for historical analyses of the collaborative knowledge culture of botany and for research into historical biodiversity. Therefore, the digital representation of this complementary sources should fulfil the requirements of the humanities and natural sciences as well. In this paper, we describe challenges, solutions and lessons learned in this regard as a summary of experiences from multiple projects on the data and edition platform hallerNet around the Bernese polymath Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777).