The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories (grbio.org) is down.
This week I was asked by a curator of a new entomological collection how could she register the collection.
If it was an herbarium, the obvious answer would be Index Herbariorum. For other types of biological collections, GRBio was the first thing that came to my mind. But, sadly, the GRBio server is down!
Is this temporary or definitive? Are there alternatives that I could/should recommend? Any services that I should consider to implement at the national GBIF node?
We understand that they are working on a security issue and expect to have GRBIO back up soon.
That said, GBIF has a task in its 2018 Implementation Plan (p.35, https://www.gbif.org/document/36j6HhbR4kOMY6oqcamEMk) to try to bring the GRBio/GRSciColl data into the GBIF infrastructure. At present, we’re in a position to advance the work and are doing the necessary pre-planning to begin.
Not quite an answer to the immediate question, but a signal of what’s to come.
This is one of those things that really should be in Wikidata. It seems crazy that information about museums, herbaria, and other collections is duplicated across GBIF, GrBio, Wikipedia, and other sites. Wikidata is going to become the defect global database for many of the basic facts about the world, and there’s a much bigger community of editors available than anything we can muster. Let’s be more outward looking and think of the bigger picture. Given the rise of GLAM there’s a lot of scope for making use of Wikidata, enabling museums and herbaria to better appreciate what they have, and for those resources to be discoverable.