The objective of this project is to expand GBIF’s community of data publishers to marine research stations and library collections by improving the capacity of the participating nodes to provide support to these potential publishers and the wealth of knowledge that they will provide to fill in geographic and temporal data gaps. This will be accomplished in two ways:
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Training series: A combined series of one 2-3 day workshop and two help desk working sessions. These sessions will introduce GBIF/OBIS and explore data quality, cleaning and publication tools and workflows. Training materials will be created and existing resources will be utilized from VertNet, BID and OBIS. Training will focus on streamlining the GBIF/OBIS publication pipeline for marine stations and libraries, but others will be welcome.
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Documentation: New written and video documentation will include fieldbook-to-portal workflows, a combined template for GBIF/OBIS data preparation and publication, and a marine-based case study for workshop participants, which will be provided to the BID curriculum.
All activities will include the use of the North American Regional and GBIF.us portals, hosted by the GBIF Secretariat. All activities will be evaluated through short-term participation metrics. Tools and documentation will be made available via hosted portals for on-going access and use.
Project progress
By midterm reporting the project has moved forward positively and met its goals and objectives for the midpoint of the project: the kick-off meeting was held and planning for the “Fieldbook to Portal” training workshop has begun. Beyond this, progress has also been made toward several other goals, including the creation of training materials, a community survey and workshop and helpdesk scheduling.
During the first half of the project the team has monitored the progression of the project through monthly planning-group meetings and semi-regular communications via a project Slack channel. The project has also made two minor, but significant changes to the project’s focus: first adding a member to the planning team and second, based on the responses to their survey and the level of experience of potential workshop participants, it will now not create a use-case for the workshop, but instead build the use-case for use by GBIF, OBIS, and others for future trainings.
In the second half of the project the team will change to twice-weekly meetings for workshop planning and to perform regular monitoring of progress toward the completion of the project goals and creation of materials in a timely manner.
