SOCIAL NETWORKING AND THE FUTURE OF ON-LINE COLLECTIONS ACCESS

There is a growing consensus among the natural history collections community, federal agencies, and funding bodies that a coordinated effort is needed to capture and mobilize data from biological collections (including paleontology collections) across the USA. A national initiative in collections digitization has the potential to massively increase the amount of species data available to researchers and to have a genuinely transformative effect, by opening up new avenues of research, involving communities that have not previously been customers of museum data. This will present significant new challenges of data access for institutions that host and serve these data. The answers to some of these challenges may lie in the area of social networking.

Traditionally, on-line collection access has been a one-way process involving the delivery of static collections data and images to users via the worldwide web. With the explosive growth in social networking technologies, this paradigm appears increasingly outdated. Second-generation collections databases will enable users to manipulate the data they retrieve via queries; to group, tag, annotate, and share it, and to feed back these amendments to provider institutions. For researchers, this will provide a cyberinfrastructure to build collaborative on-line research networks that are centered on collection records. These same toolsets can be used to greatly improve public accessibility; tagging will increase resource discovery, annotation will allow users to add personal narratives as easily as a taxonomic opinion, and the ability to be groups will allow them share these with friends and family. Teachers will be able to use these databases as a supporting infrastructure for classroom activities and students will be able to share the results of their class work.

These developments will present institutions and collection managers with new challenges, both technical and policy-based. In this presentation we will explore some of these challenges in the context of a project to reshape the Paleontology Portal, a first generation collections portal for paleontology collections, into a fully interactive computational infrastructure for scientific research and tool for public discovery of collections.