[Nhcoll-l] Bird Data Harmonization Workshop

[Carla Cicero]

Curators/managers of ornithological collections: Please see the invitation
below for a data workshop to be held at the North American Ornithological
Conference <https://naocbirds.org/> in Puerto Rico.

If you actively manage collection data that are published to
VertNet/GBIF/iDigBio, and want to see data standardized to make them more
discoverable for research and education, this workshop will be of interest
to you. Please fill out the form <https://forms.gle/EpoUKupYWS3AuFK99> with
your intent to attend, if you have not done so already.

Title: Bird Data Harmonization Workshop invitation
Date and time: Tuesday, 11 August 2020
Convenors: John Bates, Carla Cicero, Town Peterson
Invitees: Bird curators and collections managers

Rationale: The natural history museum collections community in ornithology
has made major strides in recent decades towards sharing its data resources
openly to scientists and interested citizens. As a consequence, 7.69
million bird specimen records are now available and searchable online in
DarwinCore format, which is a remarkable achievement. This massive
storehouse of bird data is making possible many exciting scientific
analyses that are teaching important new lessons about bird diversity and
biology.

The DarwinCore provides an ISO standard set of fields for aggregating data
from diverse institutions and sources. In theory, these data can be
integrated seamlessly once structured into DarwinCore fields. However,
DarwinCore describes only the nature of each field and what it should
contain; it does not control the values entered into those fields. Thus,
aggregated data often include diverse, confusing, and near-random content
in DarwinCore fields, which detracts from their utility and hinders
discoverability.

As one example, we recently analyzed the terms served by different natural
history museums under the field PreparationType. Instead of a small number
of expected terms such as “study skin,” “skeleton,” “pickle,” “wing,” etc.,
we found over 22,000 distinct terms including the names of people, field
preparation numbers, and many other values. Inspections of other DarwinCore
fields indicate a similar lack of control in data content.

NAOC 2020 plans: This workshop is designed as a meeting of minds among
those who work with and manage avian specimen data. We will review the
overall situation, and lay out a plan to create standardized “vocabularies”
for key data fields. In 2020, we will start by working with three important
fields (PreparationType, Sex, and Age) with the goal of creating a standard
vocabulary for these fields. Participants will be expected to implement
those three vocabularies in their respective collections databases over
succeeding months, resulting in a qualitative improvement in the quality
and utility of bird specimen data. Once we have a list of the participating
collections, we will produce summaries of the data that each is
contributing to VertNet, and we will provide summaries of the data
“situation” to each curator/collections manager in advance of the meeting,
to facilitate productive discussions.

Future years will involve more complex data unification/standardization
challenges, such as creating a taxonomy field or fields that would offer an
interpretation of bird specimen identifications under one or several
global-scale authority lists for bird names. The final outcome will be the
possibility of creating modern “bird specimen inventories” … updating data
from the 1980s… such as an inventory of bird study skins by age and sex for
each species, or a single searchable catalog of avian tissue resources. But
that is a vision into the future; for 2020, we will work with the
relatively simple fields listed above.

PLEASE fill out a brief survey <https://forms.gle/EpoUKupYWS3AuFK99> regarding
your potential participation.

-- 
Carla Cicero, Ph.D
Staff Curator of Birds
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
3101 Valley Life Sciences Building
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3160
TEL: (510) 642-7868
FAX: (510) 643-8238

http://mvz.berkeley.edu
https://carlacicero.net
http://vertnet.org
https://arctosdb.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_collections
http://americanornithology.org/ <http://www.americanornithology.org/>
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