Thursday, December 12, 2019

iDigBio Paleo Digitization Working Group Workshop

The iDigBio Paleo Digitization Working Group is now accepting applications to attend a workshop focused on georeferencing for paleo collections, to be held in Salt Lake City April 27-29, 2020. This workshop is sponsored by iDigBio and funding for travel to Salt Lake City may be available. 
To apply, please fill out this application by Friday, January 10, 2020.

About the workshop: As the paleo collections community wraps up several TCNs we recognize that a significant amount of digitization work remains to be done and that georeferencing is one of the next big roadblocks. Across all collection types, there are major issues with the quality of georeference data currently available on biodiversity data aggregators such as iDigBio and GBIF. For paleo collections, there are additional issues related to applying existing georeferencing workflows in the paleontological context, as well as to sharing georeference data publicly. This workshop will take advantage of the momentum catalyzed by ADBC funding in the paleontological collections community to address critical issues related to georeferencing workflows and georeferencing data quality. We will bring representatives from the paleo TCNs/PENs together with participants representing perspectives external to the existing ADBC community, to:
  • Address the lack and poor quality of specimen georeference data shared on biodiversity aggregators, e.g. the iDigBio Portal, by determining recommendations for the paleo collections community on best practices and workflows for generating and sharing this data.
  • Identify technical barriers to implementing these recommendations and discuss a strategy for communicating them to standards organizations, aggregators, collection management software solutions, and georeferencing software tools.
  • Disseminate the findings of this workshop widely, both within the paleo collections community (including to collectors) and as a resource discoverable by other domains. Findings will include a “toolkit” to share the recommendations on best practices and workflows determined by this workshop.
More information can be found on the workshop wiki page.

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