Irish National Node Workshop Summary

Chair: Chris Emblow

10.30 – 11.00  Registration - Tea / Coffee and welcome address. Chris Emblow , managing director of Ecological Consultancy Services Ltd (EcoServe) and chair of the meeting welcomed the participants to the Irish National BioCASE workshop. Participants introduced themselves and briefly outlined their involvement in biological collection holding in Ireland . Brian Beckett (EcoServe) gave a brief overview of what was planned for the day. The purpose of this workshop was (i) to introduce and demonstrate the project to Irish biological collection holders (ii) to place BioCASE in the context of other EU initiatives (iii) to focus Irish collection holders on project participation (iv) to get feedback from Irish biological holders on how they see BioCASE fitting into the biological collections community in Ireland, and (v) to hear about current biological collection management practices in Ireland from Irish biological collection holders themselves.

11.00 – 11.30  Introduction to the BioCASE project. Brian Beckett presented a short itroduction to the programme. This presentation is available to download here.

11.30 – 12.30  Presentations of participants describing their collections/databases.

1. The Natural History Museum . Mr. Nigel Monaghan - Keeper, Natural History Museum, Dublin

2. The Trinity College Herbarium. Prof. John Parnell – Head of the Dept. of Botany, Trinity College Dublin . This presentation is available to download here.

3. The National Botanic Gardens. Dr. Matthew Jebb - Taxonomist, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin . This presentation is available to download here.

4. Ireland ’s National Platform for Biodiversity Research. Dr. Steve Waldren - INPBR secretariat, BEC Consultants. This presentation is available to download here.

5. The Zoology Museum Collection.   Dr. Julian Reynolds – Head of the Dept. of Zoology, Trinity College Dublin

14:00 – 14.30  Discussion of metadata information and computer methods. Chris Emblow . 

This presentation is available to download here.

14:30 – 15.30  Questionnaires and discussion of user requirements for BioCASE. Brian Beckett. 

This presentation is available to download here.

15:30 – 16.00  General discussions of further requirements for establishment of the Irish network. Open forum:

  Several key points from an open discussion on biological collection holding in Ireland and BioCASE included:

1.    Participants were interested in the BioCASE programme and were willing to enhance their contribution to the project but information technology infrastructures, particularly in government departments is not currently capable of supporting advanced electronic information exchange, particularly unit level data exchange. Neither the Natural History Museum nor the National Botanic Gardens were connected to the internet via a webserver.

2.    Participants emphasised the difficulty some were having in securing sufficient funding to facilitate electronic cataloguing of existing biological collections. For example, very substantial backlogs in holdings exist in the Natural History Museum (estimated as requiring 75 man-years to clear at present volume). In this context, some participants felt that their organisations were ‘several steps’ behind a point where they could usefully and fully utilise and participate in the BioCASE programme. However, some programmes focusing on partial and stepwise cataloguing will allow partial participation which will be strengthened over time. All institutes did however have some collections that had been fully or partially digitised. For example, the Natural History Museum in conjunction with UCD Zoology is currently running the CoBiD programme (Collections-based Biology in Dublin) which is making the tremendous resources of the National Museum of Ireland (Natural History) more accessible to teaching and research efforts at UCD, and to the scientific community as a whole. Personnel work strategically in collections, in ways which amount to value-added research in the NMINH scientific collections. One by-product of this is detailed records of what, and how very much, NMINH has to offer. As digital products develop, they are added for access through this web portal. The currently available catalogue products can be viewed at: http://www.ucd.ie/zoology/museum/collections.html. The National Botanic Gardens have an up to date electronic database of their living collection and partial databases for all other holdings. 

3.    Participants recognised the potential value of BioCASE not only as an advanced biological collection search tool but also as a potentially effective means to demonstrate collection value and importance when lobbying for funding.

4.    The issue of intellectual property rights and copyright related to participation in BioCASE were not regarded as a problem in general as the data would be fully controlled by the collection holding institute. However, it was highlighted that some sensitive information, such as locations of sensitive or endangered species particularly from observational data, would have to be omitted from any BioCASE contributions as global exposure would not be in the best interests of securing not only local but global biological diversity. Concerns were also raised regarding the making accessible of biological collections information via the internet would lead to a siginificant increase in the number of requests for loans and information which would stretch staff resources even further.

5.    It was recognised that the biological collections community in Ireland do not have a specific platofrm for information exchange and the need for some form of Irish forum of biological collection holders was recognised. No formal agreement was made but an informal will to form a group of interested parties for the purpose of representation, networking and lobbying was expressed.  This forum could be as simple as a list server.

6.    Regarding the question of current collection database structure, it was generally agreed by participants that the preferred model is as simplistic as possible, preferably linear and ‘two-dimensional’ in nature capable of being searched via simple text strings. The Irish National Node emphasised the flexibility of both the metadata and unit level BioCASE software in its capacity to be moulded around collection holder’s individual specific database requirements.

7.   A number of potentially overlapping initiatives were identified.  The Heritage Council are in the process of carrying out a review of biodiversity data holdings in Ireland .  National Parks and Wildlife are also currently making an assessment of their biodiversity data holdings and the Irish Biodiversity Research Platform will soon be initiating a working group on biodiversity data holdings.  The data and expertise collected during the BioCase project will contribute to all three of these initiatives and it is hoped that they will also enhance the BioCase metadata collection.

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