Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-31 11:45 AM – 11:50 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-08
Abstract
LUOMUS is a de facto national species information center and biodiversity informatics leader. The role of ICT team in LUOMUS in addition to assistance with IT issues is to create and develop museum´s webpages, databases and other biodiversity informatics projects.
Therefore, the challenge is double: on one hand, we react to such tasks as renewing webpages, and at the same time we develop systems that accommodate various types of biological data, such as specimen information, species names, observations, images and distribution maps, e-checklists, and species pages (Box 1). How do we manage?
Traditionally, as also reflected in the authors guidelines for the TDWG 2013 abstracts, there have been certain communication and understanding difficulties between those who know species and those who know computers. In the museum context, taxonomy experts are not only involved in the collection management, but are also expected to deliver high-impact research, are often involved in outreach and teaching, so, understandably, an extra load of being involved in e-systems is not always warmly welcomed. Efficiency is a matter of motivation, so what is the reward?
Most of biodiversity information projects in North Europe have to invent ways to motivate the experts on non-monetary grounds. We believe that clarity, visibility and recognition are the key elements for motivation, and it turned out that in the museum context this works reasonably well.
We are 10 people in the ICT team of LUOMUS, having such roles as system architect, IT specialist and taxonomy coordinator. When calling for taxonomical content, we minimise the e-mail load on the taxonomy experts and highlight the importance of the e-availability of biodiversity data. Mapping taxa to people has been instrumental in improving the workflows (Box 1). We will indicate statuses of the individual checklists and taxa online together with names of the responsible taxonomy experts.