[Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

[David Campbell]

> We ask for $$millions of public funding to acquire specimens.
> We ask for $$millions of public funding to house and curate such specimens.
> We ask for $$millions of public funding to staff these collections with highly trained taxonomists.
> Yet we want to block access to the specimen data because it is so poor (labels or identifications).
> We complain about the data transcription problems caused by volunteers and "minimally trained" people, yet few "highly trained" individuals wish to devote their careers to data enter and validation.

I support access to specimen data.  But compilations with no access to
the underlying specimen data are not especially reliable, and not all
online databases have easy ways to submit corrections.  (Of course,
making it easy for anyone to change what it says is not a good idea,
either-the corrections should be carefully checked, too.)   Making
specimen data available is one way to allow people to check it; the
problem is uncritical acceptance of poor data and lack of support for
making it better.

Although we may ask for lots of funding, in my experience we don't get it.

Given the number of highly trained individuals who leave taxonomy
because they can't get employment, I suspect that there may be more
people interested in data validation than expected.  It's not
necessary to devote a whole career to data validation in order to help
substantially.   If reviewing data were regarded as a reasonable part
of a job, worthy of funding, and if the databases readily accepted
input suggestions, then one could contribute a lot simply in the
course of regular taxonomic work.  But if there's no support for
regular taxonomic work, and if the databases are difficult to correct,
poorly documented, etc., and if contributing to the databases is
assumed to be something that taxonomists can do for free in their
spare time, then there's little hope for improvement.

Even if the highly trained individuals don't want to do the data
validation, no one else can.  I can figure out the vast majority of
mollusk labels I see because I have a good idea of what genus
something may have been assigned to, because I've seen enough
Latinized binomials to have a good guess at likely possibilities,
because I've got an idea of what the possible localities are and know
a fair number of historic and current geographic names, and because
I've seen a lot of bad handwriting from the past 200 years.
Additionally, I know about major resources such as the Index Animalium
and even online databases.  Some of those are easier to learn than
others, but it takes time and interest.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
Collections Assistant
The Paleontological Research Institution
1259 Trumansburg Road
Ithaca NY 14850