Online biodiversity portals and databases enabling access to large volumes of biological information represent a potentially extensive set of resources for a variety of user groups. However, in order for these resources to live up to their promise they need…

Comprehensive biodiversity surveys are unavailable for most Central and Eastern European countries. Although birds in general are well-studied, distributional information in the region is sparse and largely out-of of-date; I used museum specimen locality records and raster GIS data layers…

Abstract. - Kinds of occurrences (evidence of particular living organisms) can be grouped by common data and metadata characteristics that are determined by the way that the occurrence represents the organism. The creation of occurrence resources follows a pattern which…

Access to digitised specimen data is a vital means to distribute information and in turn create knowledge. Pooling the accessibility of specimen and observation data under common standards and harnessing the power of distributed datasets places more and more information…

Natural history collections represent a vast repository of biodiversity data of international significance. There is an imperative to capture the data through digitisation projects in order to expose the data to new and established users of biodiversity data. On the…

Natural science collections comprise a small component of a more extensive source of data on which questions about the natural world may be addressed. However, NHC data offer, when digitised, an exceptional resource: within collections lies the most extensive dataset…

Large numbers of legacy taxonomic publications are currently being digitized to make them online available and ready for full text search. The documents are being marked up with XML for two purposes: To preserve the document structure, and to facilitate…

Digitizing the information carried by specimens in natural history collections is a key endeavor providing falsifiable information about past and present biodiversity on a global scale, for application in a variety of research fields far beyond the current application in…

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s Task Group has formulated three basic recommendations to the GBIF Governing Board in order to increase the rate of the digitization of natural history collections and improve the usage of this information resource: (i) GBIF…

A survey on the challenges and concerns invovled with digitizing natural history specimens was circulated to curators, collections managers, and administrators in the natural history community in the Spring of 2009, with over 200 responses received. The overwhelming barrier to…