Hi Donald, Tim and all,
It’s interesting that I didn’t link 1.4 to this topic. I think this is because while the section title speaks to the aggregation part of the issue, I’m not sure the text captures the use case about what one then does with the data. Specificall using these data as a management tool to understand capacity, completeness, strengths, weaknesses, priorities etc of an institution/nation/government/scientific community etc isn’t covered. Also, aggregation is in some cases unnecessary. If you are an institution head, while aggregation is useful, it is not essential to making the business case of why our collections are useful. Its simply value in the effort of having a stable, standardised record of the collection (a benchmark) that is critical. Another point is that the comparison component isn’t captured at the moment. i.e. the need to compare holdings often arises. This isn’t purely about numbers, but also about strengths of collections and complementarity. For example, Kew and NHM’s botanical collections are complementary and we try to minimise overlap so that when viewed together we are more complete and there is less redundancy. That said, some of this is about benchmarking (comparing sizes and related metrics of collections for example) and this benchmarking is of itself part of the use case, but I know some will also resist this for political reasons.
Getting back to aggregation, the push for these aggregated statistics this has often come for higher in organisations who need an evidence base on which to argue for the role of collections and greater cooperation - in part to manage the scare resources of staff and expertise, maximising (or often preserving) taxonomic breadth while minimising duplication. Lastly for me, as we move toward developing a more integrated model of the natural world, founded on observations and collections, we need an evidence base to see where we are deficient in data, and which organizations might coordinate to fill these gaps. The collection’s catalogue isn’t of itself sufficient to do this but its the foundation for such an effort. This for me at least, is the big overarching goal, and while the ideas paper might not go too far on this point (some will see this as too much of a stretch) hinting at the catalogue as the foundations for such as effort, given that complete digitisation of our collections is still a long way off, might be useful.