Current Trends in Biodiversity Collection Description

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Current Trends in Biodiversity Collection
Description

• Neil Thomson
• The Natural History Museum

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Summary

• Characteristics of biodiversity collections
• Collection descriptions at the NHM
• UK and European initiatives
• The wider picture international and global
  initiatives
• Challenges

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Biodiversity Collections

• Types of biodiversity collection
• Value of collections
• Benefits of data sharing
• Who are the users?

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Institutional Level

• Collections and databases at the NHM
• CLD project

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Reasons for CLD at the NHM

• "Access to collections" initiative.
• Speedier coverage than at item level
• Verbose records, complementing databases.
• Recording information provided by visitors
• Detailed records for researchers / audit
• Cross-searching of ALL collections at the NHM
• Strategic planning
• Re-uniting scattered collections
• Provides data for external initiatives

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National Level

• Fenscore
• National Biodiversity Network
• BioCASE National Nodes
• contain records for biological collections in the
  country whether or not a database exists.
• NHM is the UK National Node

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The BioCASE Collection-Level Profile

• 3 levels
• Collection
• Organisation
• Network
• 4 main data blocks
• Descriptive
• Adminstrative
• Keywords
• Related

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What does it look like?

• Currently at a very early stage of development.
• Software provided by Berlin Botanic Garden, based
  on a metadata profile developed at the NHM.
• Pre-seeded with data from the earlier BioCISE
  project.
• Little data for each collection and mainly free
  text.

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European Level

• BioCASE
• Framework V funded
• 3 year project ending October 2004
• 31 participating countries
• Coordinated by the Berlin Botanic Garden

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Two-level access

• BioCASE caters for information at unit level
  (specimen or observation) as well as at
  collection level.
• Unit-level records will be accessed directly in
  participating databases.
• Collection-level records will be accessed through
  each countrys National Node.

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International Global Levels

• ABCD
• Access to Biological Collections Data
• Adds North America and Australia
• GBIF
• Global Biodiversity Information Facility
• Promoting the use of global data standards

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Challenges

• Addressing the needs of different audiences
• Organism names
• Place names
• Getting the data