Abstract:

Promotion of collection importance is paramount in securing a future in research and outreach through the exposure of diverse stakeholders to the incredible resource of biological collections. One outlet to increase exposure to collections’ data is through data aggregation. Data aggregation allows for a wide array of research, education and outreach activities that would otherwise be impossible. As the National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) funded by the National Science Foundation - iDigBio has made large contributions to collections with regards to communication, outreach and community training. Two facets of iDigBio’s mission statement are: to facilitate the aggregation of collections data and to promote its use. Recently, a new resource for fish collections (fishfindR.net) has contributed to both the aforementioned missions. FishFindR utilizes data aggregated by iDigBio to explore, share and compare fish collection data as it is presented in the iDigBio portal via a web resource. The data is shown in accessible, easy to use and easy to read interfaces. This resource also provides the fish research community with a way to reconcile collection data to institutions from the iDigBio recordsets. This gives fish collections stakeholders data and tools that will be useful in communicating their value, advocating for support, applying best practices to their data publishing and improving collections’ sustainability as a community. Going forward, it is the hope that this resource will provide other taxonomic disciplines with a framework to provide similar services for their stakeholders and that through a network of taxonomic specific collection resources that collections’ staff will become similarly empowered to use their own data as a communication tool.

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