Herbaria and Botanical Gardens community of practice

Draft

Introduction and Background

UC Berkeley is customizing CollectionSpace for several members of the Berkeley Natural History Museum consortium. These partners are committed to providing solutions that can be used by other natural history collections. The early adopters of CollectionSpace at UC Berkeley are: the University and Jepson Herbaria, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the UC Botanical Garden. For the IMLS-funded Deploying CollectionSpace project, UC Berkeley is developing documentation and templates to help other natural history collections, and herbaria and botanical gardens in particular, understand how to deploy CollectionSpace.

Workshop Materials

In February of this year, CollectionSpace developers and deployers joined with invitees representing herbaria and botanical gardens in California and New Mexico to conduct an IMLS-sponsored workshop at UC Berkeley, the goal of which was a model for sharing knowledge, resources, and experience as regards specimen management systems. The management of living and preserved collections, data capture, data sharing, mapping, georeferencing, and related topics were explored by way of demonstrations, discussions, and guided activities. (See IMLS Workshop Agenda.)

Sample Records Contributed by Workshop Participants for Use in Evaluation

Customizations to CollectionSpace for Herbaria and Botanical Gardens

CollectionSpace (CSpace) is designed to deliver a set of modular solutions and services that match the functional requirements for managing museum collections for a number of domains. It is also designed to support customizations shaped by the standards, workflows, and legacy data used by adopting organizations. One standard used by herbaria and botanical gardens is Darwin Core (DwC), which includes a "glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries." Many DwC data elements were integrated (with wording changes) into the natural history version of CollectionSpace -- see DwC to CSpace mapping -- and the capability of exporting CollectionSpace data in Darwin Core format is planned.

In addition to incorporating relevant standards, customization involves a collaborative process of business and data analysis, followed by a needs assessment and decisions on how to address those needs. Decisions are modeled using wireframes (user interface mockups) and schema documents (which represent data elements). Examples of customizations made to better support the natural history collections include cataloging, vocabulary control, and lending and borrowing.

Cataloging Specimens

The heart of a museum is its collection, and the heart of a museum management system is its catalog, a detailed record of the objects in the collection. While the basic, or core, version of CollectionSpace (CSpace) provides a rich set of tools for describing and categorizing objects (see the basic cataloging screen) , they do not suffice for most herbaria and botanical gardens. These institutions require more detailed geographical information, as well as documentation of scientific nomenclature, classification, and identification. CSpace has addressed such needs through cataloging customizations like the following:

Object Identification: User interface and database fields were added to specify and document information vital to specimen management systems, such as the determination history of the specimen and type status, and fields not important to natural history collections were removed. (See natural history object identification screen.)
Field Collection Information: Fields were added to help identify the collecting event, and a Collecting Event authority will be added in the near future to provide additional functionality. (See natural history field collection screen.)
Locality Information: The place at which a specimen was collected can be specified in terms of a geographical heirarchy, latitude-longitude, elevation, etc. A separate panel is provided for recording georeferencing detail. (See natural history locality information screen.)
Object Description Information: Fields were added that help describe natural history specimens, including form and phase. (See natural history object description screen.)

These and other changes to CSpace's core cataloging functionality are reflected in this table, which was used to create an extension to the core CSpace schema.

Vocabulary Terms

The core version of CollectionSpace supports the creation and use of controlled vocabularies for people, places, subject terminology, storage locations, and institutions. The natural history version, which is scheduled for deployment at the UC and Jepson Herbaria, adds scientific taxonomy to the list. Supported taxonomic name information can be seen in this wireframe and schema.

Lending and Borrowing

Lending and borrowing among herbaria and other natural history museums can involve complex transactions. A single lending transaction can convey multiple specimens, which may be delivered in one shipment or in batches. Similarly, the borrowed specimens may returned all at once or a few at a time, or some or all may be transferred to other institutions. Customizations to support this range of transactions have been designed, implemented, and will be included in the above mentioned deployment at the UC and Jepson Herbaria. The user interface extensions are visible in the wireframes for the lending and borrowing screens; data fields that were added in support of lending are described in this table; and the resulting data structures for lending and borrowing are documented in XML schema.

.A module supporting botanical propagation is also under development for the UC Botanical Garden.

Data Migration

With the completion of the wireframes and schema documents, tasks linked to these documents are added to JIRA, the project's to-do list. (See, for example, the task list for the version 2.3 launch at the UC and Jepson Herbaria.) Cycles of implementation and testing by deployment and functional teams complete the customization process and give way to data migration.

Data maps, constructed during the customization process, specify a CSpace destination for each piece of legacy data to be retained. Taking SMaSCH, the legacy collection management system for the UC and Jepson Herbaria, as an example, we have:

Guided by maps such as these, data is transferred to CSpace using some convenient set of ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools and processes. See, for example, the SMaSCH-CSpace ETL data migration plan. As this document suggests, migrating data from one collection management system to another in this way can be complex and time-consuming; so UC Berkeley is working on a general process and a set of tools to help deploying collections migrate data into CollectionSpace. More information is available upon request.

Templates, or how to obtain and use the code

With Ray, document steps to download from github the 2.3 UCJEPS version. Point to existing documentation on how to deploy?