If you are a Swiss non-profit organisation that holds natural history collections, you can contribute by sharing your digital records of specimens with national and international data infrastructures.
1. Digitising Specimens
The initial phase involves creating digital records of the information associated with the specimens in your collection. There are several approaches to digitisation. In most cases, data are manually entered from specimen labels into a database or spreadsheet. Large-scale digitisation, on the other hand, relies on advanced technology and efficient workflows to enhance data capture efficiency. Different methods and best practices can be found in the Handbook on Natural History Collections (Frick & Greeff, 2021).
Data FAIR Principles
Data management should follow key principles that meet the standards of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, known as the FAIR principles. These principles are intentionally broad, designed to be flexible and widely applicable across different contexts.
Data Exchange Standards
Standards for data exchange establish rules for describing, recording and sharing natural history data. These standards, such as Darwin Core, play a crucial role in enabling the unambiguous exchange of collection data within the scientific community and to the public globally. They also facilitate data retrieval and better communication among different database systems. More information about data standards can be found on the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) website.
2. Publishing Specimen Data
Once digitised, you can upload your specimen data in DAGI, the national data aggregator for Natural History Collections, and benefit from all available features. By automating the time-consuming processes of encoding and validating your data, and by providing a straight gate to publish data in GBIF, DAGI makes it easier to standardise, enrich, publish and update data, while ensuring compliance with the FAIR principles. More information about DAGI can be found here: Aggregating Data.
Standardised data are then published simultaneously, both nationally via the SwissNatColl portal and internationally through GBIF. Your institution’s records will be presented alongside those of other Swiss collections, accessible for search and download by users around the world.