2 & 9 November 2020 Virtual Workshop


Background

The current drive to digitise the estimated 1.5 billion objects in Natural Science Collections across Europe has resulted in massive numbers of digitised specimens becoming accessible online. However, very little of the collection data associated with these objects is currently available online given the vast amount of work involved in transcribing the specimen labels. There have been several approaches taken to increase the number of transcribed specimens, including outsourcing to external companies and taking the task to the general public for their help through citizen science and crowdsourcing platforms. These platforms have proved to be highly successful, both in the rate and quality of transcription and in engaging broader and more diverse audiences with the Natural Science Collections. However, there are still significant hurdles to overcome to achieve seamless movement of data between the institutional collection management systems (CMS) and the crowdsourcing platforms, with many transcribed data being unable to be reingested into the institutional database.


Aim

This workshop aims to bring the Citizen Science platform developers and the Collection Management System (CMS) developers together to develop standards and best practice for managing data migration between these two systems. The workshop will also bring in collection managers to give them an opportunity to discover the citizen science options available and the implementation considerations for the CMS used in their institutes. The workshop will consist of two three-hour sessions in an online platform. There will be a series of short presentations to cover the current status of crowdsourcing platforms and collection management systems with regard to managing crowdsourcing data flow.

The focus will be on transcription data but there will opportunities to discuss additional citizen science data including quality assessments and georeferencing.

For more information please visit https://osf.io/2xhz6/wiki/home/

MOBILISE Workshop, Crowdsourcing for Natural Science Collections – closing the circle of data flow