RECODE at the Natural History Museum London
Since May 2023, I am working as contracted data architect in the team of RECODE, the Rethinking Collections Data Ecosystems programme at the Natural History Museum London, UK (NHM). The programme develops and implements the new collection management system (CMS) for the NHM, which with 80 million collection objects is one of the largest collection institutions worldwide. The NHM’s natural sciences collections span biodiversity, geodiversity and anthropology with their unique, though overlapping sets of metadata, stakeholder traditions and data governance requirements. Implementation of the new CMS is conducted in collaboration with the SER-Group as industry partner.
Connecting Collections & the Global Registry of Scientific Collections
The Regional Diversity working group within the Biodiversity Crisis Response Committee of SPNHC initiated in 2021 the Global Collections Network Campaign to increase the diversity within the collections community and SPNHC, and strengthen a worldwide, densely interlinked network of natural science collections and an equitable, inclusive and engaged collections community. Collaborating with the team of the Data Products group at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), responsible for the Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl), we conducted a first pilot campaign in Ecuador.
Building on the experiences from the pilot campaign, we continued the initiative as part of a CESP project (CESP2022-011) funded by GBIF in the fall of 2022. The partnership included the national GBIF nodes of Argentina, Ecuador and Guatemala, as well as collection professionals and biodiversity scientists from Latin America and the Caribbean region. We organized a very successful webinar series with simultaneous translation for English and Spanish in September 2022. Over 300 participants joined across the four weekly sessions, with 87% of attendees returning to following sessions. Recordings of the webinars have been made available as part of SPNHC’s YouTube channel.
GIS Collective & HoneyBeeWatch
From 2020 to 2021 I collaborated with GIS Collective, the COLOSS Survivors task force and Apimondia’s BeeXML standard working group, contributing data structure development and advise on data management decisions for the development and launch of the HoneyBeeWatch citizen science platform.
