Collections Catalogue - Daily Summaries

[dhobern]

Daily summary from 19 April 2020

@dhobern

This summary covers activity up to 12:00 UTC on 19 April 2020. The following questions and points were raised. We aim to post summaries in other languages to the Spanish , French and Chinese consultation pages. Visit the consultation site to add your thoughts to these and other topics.

• 1.1. Directory to support the collections community (USE)
  • Question: What is the “collections community”? Do collection managers have the same goals as administrators, taxonomists, etc.?
  • Response: Natural science collections support a more unified community than collections as a whole.
  • Response: The catalogue will assist institutional managers with planning, funding and showing importance.
  • Response: The catalogue helps to establish collections as a global science infrastructure.
• 2.2. Identifiers for collections (INFORMATION)
  • Response : It is unlikely that everyone will ever agree on a single definition of “collection” or “institution” so we must make it possible for them to decide how to identify their own collections.
• 3.1. Pathways and tools for publishing collection records (TECHNOLOGY)
  • Response: 1) Success will depend on offering good software for managing information, 2) Wikidata is likely to be a good way to share information, but not to manage it.
• 3.5. Interfaces, APIs and client modules (TECHNOLOGY)
  • Response: OpenRefine may be a valuable tool for reconciling data from different sources. It may help to link information about the same collection even when identifiers are not fully standardised.
• 4.1. Ownership of information for each collection (GOVERNANCE)
  • Response: Good presentation of information will encourage institutions to take active control of their collection records.
  • Response: We should consider what will help institutions prioritise keeping information current.
• Document: 10 recommendations from DiSSCo
  • This document was added on 17 April - it offers a series of suggestions from the European DiSSCo infrastructure team.