Dr. Elisabeth Wheeler, professor emeritus of wood and paper science; Deborah Westmoreland, an NC State librarian with the Digital Library Initiatives Department; and Kathy Brown, assistant director of planning and research at the NCSU Libraries, are the project’s three principal investigators.

InsideWood will build on existing databases, specimen collections and photographic images at NC State and other institutions. The wood collection at NC State is the largest in the southeastern United States, outside of the Smithsonian Institution. In all, NC State holds 6,916 database records covering extant and fossil angiosperms, extant conifers, and hardwood fibers (these records are available on computer diskette but not over the Internet), 31,919 wood samples, 4,000 microscope slides and 4,050 photomicrographs collected over the past 114 years. Project researchers will create a Web site with nonexclusive, open architecture to allow for long-term sustainability of databases for wood identification.

A key objective of the project is to integrate information held at NC State with the Wood Uses database of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the U.K. Other databases from other sources will also be added. The final product will be a unique Web resource with information organized according to the International Association of Wood Anatomists List of Features for Hardwood Identification. By the end of the project, researchers, educators and professionals in the life sciences will have a powerful Internet-accessible wood-identification reference tool in addition to a rich source of data for a wide variety of wood-research studies.