scholarly journals SwissCollNet – A National Initiative for Natural History Collections in Switzerland

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Frick ◽  
Pia Stieger ◽  
Christoph Scheidegger
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Botanical Gardens ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
National Initiative ◽  
Educational Potential ◽  
Term Data

More than 60 million specimens are housed in geological and biological collections in numerous museums and botanical gardens located all over Switzerland. They are of national and international origin. Taken together they form an entity with a high scientific value and international recognition for their contribution to scientific research. Due to the federalistic organisation of Switzerland, natural history collections are located and curated in numerous institutions. So far, no common strategy for digitisation, documentation and long-term data archiving has been developed. This shortcoming has been widely identified by concerned parties. Under the lead of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, several organisations have assembled information about Swiss natural history collections. They identified measures to be taken to promote the scientific and educational potential of natural history collections in Switzerland (Beer et al. 2019). With a national initiative, the Swiss Natural History Collections Network (SwissCollNet) aims to unite Swiss natural history collections under a common vision and with a common strategy. The goal is to promote the collections themselves and to harness the scientific and educational potential of these collections for research and training. SwissCollNet consists of representatives of research, teaching, museums and botanical gardens, the data centers for information on the national fauna and flora, the Swiss Systematics Society and the Swiss node of GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The initiative aims to foster research on natural history collections. It will provide a single decentralised data infrastructure framework for Swiss research related to natural history. It will help to harmonise nationwide collection data management, digitisation and long-term data archiving. It will facilitate identification of specimens and revision of taxonomic groups. New research techniques, fast-evolving computer technologies and internet connectivity, create new opportunities for deciphering and using the wealth of information housed in Swiss and international collections. The development of an agreed strategy and research priorities on a national scale will allow fluent, fluid and permanent collaboration across all Swiss natural history collections by promoting interoperability and unified access to collections as well as creating opportunities for scientific collaboration and innovation. This national approach will create an internationally compatible research data infrastructure, while respecting and integrating regional and decentralized conditions and requirements. Thus, it will maximize the impact for science, policy and society.

scholarly journals Recent advances in understanding urethral lichen sclerosus

F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Altaf Mangera ◽  
Nadir Osman ◽  
Christopher R. Chapple
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Male Genitalia ◽  
Lichen Sclerosus ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
History Of ◽  
Surgical Treatments ◽  
Term Data

Lichen sclerosus affecting the male genitalia is a poorly understood but potentially devastating condition. The natural history of the condition is beginning to be understood better with longer follow-up of patients. Recent long-term data suggest that circumcision for lichen sclerosus limited to the prepuce may not be curative as was once thought. In addition, surgical treatments should be followed up for longer periods as recurrences may occur after urethroplasty and perineal urethrostomy.

scholarly journals Digitisation of private collections

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luc Willemse ◽  
Veljo Runnel ◽  
Hannu Saarenmaa ◽  
Ana Casino ◽  
Karsten Gödderz
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Data Management System ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Management Tools ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Private Collection ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
Private Collections

Results are presented of a study investigating solutions and procedures to incorporate private natural history collections into the international collections data infrastructure. Results are based on pilot projects carried out in three European countries aimed at approaches on how to best motivate and equip citizen collectors for digitisation: 1) In Estonia, the approach was to outline tools for registering, digitising and publishing private collection data in the biodiversity data management system PlutoF. 2) In Finland, the functionality of FinBIF, a portal offering a popular Notebook Service for citizens to store observations has been expanded to include collection specimens related to a field gathering event. 3) In the Netherlands private collection owners were approached directly and asked to start digitising their collection using dedicated software, either by themselves or with the help of volunteers who were recruited specifically for this task. In addition to management tools, pilots also looked at motivation, persons undertaking the work, scope, planning, specific knowledge or skills required and the platform for online publication. Future ownership, legality of specimens residing in private collections and the use of unique identifiers are underexposed aspects effecting digitisation. Besides streamlining the overall process of digitising private collections and dealing with local, national or international challenges, developing a communication strategy is crucial in order to effectively distribute information and keep private collection owners aware of ongoing developments. Besides collection owners other stakeholders were identified and for each of them a roadmap is outlined aimed at further streamlining the data from private collections into the international infrastructure. In conclusion recommendations are presented based on challenges encountered during this task that are considered important to really make significant progress towards the overall accessibility of data stored in privately held natural history collections.

scholarly journals Assessing the Value of Natural History Collections and Addressing Issues Regarding Long-Term Growth and Care

BioScience ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (12) ◽  
pp. 1150-1158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Bradley ◽  
Lisa C. Bradley ◽  
Heath J. Garner ◽  
Robert J. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural History Collections

Computer Generated Holographic Dual Storage Concept for Long Term Data Archiving

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christophe Martinez ◽  
Fabien Laulagnet ◽  
Frederic Petit ◽  
Philippe Carre ◽  
Pascal Boulitreau ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Archiving ◽  
Term Data

scholarly journals The development of a digitising service centre for natural history collections

ZooKeys ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 209 ◽  
pp. 75-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riitta Tegelberg ◽  
Jaana Haapala ◽  
Tero Mononen ◽  
Mika Pajari ◽  
Hannu Saarenmaa
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Entry ◽  
Imaging Data ◽  
Long Term Storage ◽  
Service Centre ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Darwin Core ◽  
The University

Digitarium is a joint initiative of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and the University of Eastern Finland. It was established in 2010 as a dedicated shop for the large-scale digitisation of natural history collections. Digitarium offers service packages based on the digitisation process, including tagging, imaging, data entry, georeferencing, filtering, and validation. During the process, all specimens are imaged, and distance workers take care of the data entry from the images. The customer receives the data in Darwin Core Archive format, as well as images of the specimens and their labels. Digitarium also offers the option of publishing images through Morphbank, sharing data through GBIF, and archiving data for long-term storage. Service packages can also be designed on demand to respond to the specific needs of the customer. The paper also discusses logistics, costs, and intellectual property rights (IPR) issues related to the work that Digitarium undertakes.

scholarly journals Use of European Open Science Cloud and National e-Infrastructures for the Long-Term Storage of Digitised Assets from Natural History Collections

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham Nieva de la Hidalga ◽  
Nicolas Cazenave ◽  
Donat Agosti ◽  
Zhengzhe Wu ◽  
Mathias Dillen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Long Term Storage ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Herbarium Collections ◽  
Access Services ◽  
Term Storage ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Digitisation of Natural History Collections (NHC) has evolved from transcription of specimen catalogues in databases to web portals providing access to data, digital images, and 3D models of specimens. These portals increase global accessibility to specimens and help preserve the physical specimens by reducing their handling. The size of the NHC requires developing high-throughput digitisation workflows, as well as research into novel acquisition systems, image standardisation, curation, preservation, and publishing. Nowadays, herbarium sheet digitisation workflows (and fast digitisation stations) can digitise up to 6,000 specimens per day. Operating those digitisation stations in parallel, can increase the digitisation capacity. The high-resolution images obtained from these specimens, and their volume require substantial bandwidth, and disk space and tapes for storage of original digitised materials, as well as availability of computational processing resources for generating derivatives, information extraction, and publishing. While large institutions have dedicated digitisation teams that manage the whole workflow from acquisition to publishing, other institutions cannot dedicate resources to support all digitisation activities, in particular long-term storage. National and European e-infrastructures can provide an alternative solution by supporting different parts of the digitisation workflows. In the context of the Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG Project 2018), three different e-infrastructures providing long-term storage have been analysed through three pilot studies: EUDAT-CINES, Zenodo, and National Infrastructures. The EUDAT-CINES pilot centred on transferring large digitised herbarium collections from the National Museum of Natural History France (MNHN) to the storage infrastructure provided by the Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES 2014), a European trusted digital repository. The upload, processing, and access services are supported by a combination of services provided by the European Collaborative Data Infrastructure (EUDAT CDI 2019) and CINES . The Zenodo pilot included the upload of herbarium collections from Meise Botanic Garden (APM) and other European herbaria into the Zenodo repository (Zenodo 2019). The upload, processing and access services are supported by Zenodo services, accessed by APM. The National Infrastructures pilot facilitated the upload of digital assets derived from specimens of herbarium and entomology collections held at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (LUOMUS) into the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF 2019). This pilot concentrates on simplifying the integration of digitisation facilities to Finnish national e-infrastructures, using services developed by LUOMUS to access FinBIF resources. The data models employed in the pilots allow defining data schemas according to the types of collection and specimen images stored. For EUDAT-CINES, data were composed of the specimen data and its business metadata (those the institution making the deposit, in this case MNHN, considers relevant for the data objects being stored), enhanced by archiving metadata, added during the archiving process (institution, licensing, identifiers, project, archiving date, etc). EUDAT uses ePIC identifiers (ePIC 2019) to identify each deposit. The Zenodo pilot was designed to allow defining specimen data and metadata supporting indexing and access to resources. Zenodo uses DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and the underlying data types as the main identifiers for the resources, augmented with fields based on standard TDWG vocabularies. FinBIF compiles Finnish biodiversity information to one single service for open access sharing. In FinBIF, HTTP URI based identifiers are used for all data, which link the specimen data with other information, such as images. The pilot infrastructure design reports describe features, capacities, functions and costs for each model, in three specific contexts are relevant for the implementation of the Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo 2019) research infrastructure, informing the options for long-term storage and archiving digitised specimen data. The explored options allow preservation of assets and support easy access. In a wider context, the results provide a template for service evaluation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC 2019) which can guide similar efforts.

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