Information about natural history collections helps to map the research landscape and assists researchers in locating and contacting the holders of specimens. Collection records contribute to the development of a fully interlinked biodiversity knowledge graph, showcasing the existence and importance of museums and herbaria and supplying context to available data on specimens. These records also potentially open new avenues for fresh use of these collections and for accelerating their full availability online.
This document explores ideas for improved global collaboration to build, maintain and use a comprehensive catalogue of the world’s natural history collections. Each idea is presented as a separate topic with a set of questions to guide discussion within the online consultation, Advancing the Catalogue of the World’s Natural History Collections.
Over the last few decades, the field of biodiversity informatics has developed to include researchers and informaticians from all over the world, collaborating to bring together knowledge of the world’s species and ecosystems in a readily usable form.
The focus of biodiversity informatics has largely been on species and other taxa (including their names, diagnostic characters and traits), natural history specimens (including information on their collection in the field, their measurements, images, sequences, etc.), and field observations (including information on occurrence, distribution and abundance surveys, monitoring activities, citizen science, genomics and many other sources). These elements together help to address two fundamental challenges in biology: characterising the set of species with which we share the planet, and understanding the changing distribution, co-occurrence, interactions, and dynamics of these species in space and time.
The biodiversity informatics community has also given attention to other categories of information that support these primary elements, especially through efforts to digitise the vast literature on taxonomy and biodiversity and work to develop a comprehensive catalogue of the world’s natural history collections, including museums, herbaria and a range of specialised collections.
These collections are the repository for materials from centuries of international investment to collect, document, study and describe species. Specimens and other materials held in these collections anchor our understanding of evolution and contemporary diversity. They provide the bridge between historical knowledge and continuing efforts to describe life on Earth. Many of their holdings are truly irreplaceable or give otherwise irrecoverable insights into past distributions and ecology. Information on the collections themselves is an important tool for accessing, enriching and using them.
Many established use cases for standardised collection information relate primarily to preserved biological collections. This paper treats these collections as its core focus. However, we hope that the consultation will also explore two other closely related contexts: 1) geological collections (often held and managed by the same institutions as biological collections) and 2) living collections (overlapping significantly with the subject matter and research uses of preserved biological collections). We welcome inputs that address this wider scope.