A GLOBAL REGISTRY FOR SCIENTIFIC COLLECTIONS: STRIKING A BALANCE BETWEEN DISCIPLINARY DETAIL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY DISCOVERABILITY

The Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl) is an online information resource developed to gather and disseminate basic information on scientific collections. Building on initiatives started for biological collections, GRSciColl expands this framework to encompass all scientific disciplines including earth and space sciences, anthropology, archaeology, biomedicine, and applied fields such as agriculture and technology. A subset of GRSciColl focuses on the U.S. federal scientific collections – this portal contains the same information as GRSciColl but includes only collections owned, managed, or overseen by a U.S. federal agency.

The goals of these registries are to (1) provide a single source of synoptic information about the collections, their institutions, and staff; and (2) facilitate the assignment of identifiers for institutions and collections that are globally unique across all disciplines. Institutional records include categorization by governance (e.g., national, state or local governmental, private non-profit) and by scientific discipline (e.g., earth science, biomedical, agricultural). Collection-level metadata categorize the types of contained specimens/samples and modes of preservation. In selecting the level of granularity for these categories, designers sought a compromise that would capture enough information to be useful in searches and inquiries and would complement the detailed archives in specimen-level databases hosted by discipline-specific groups (e.g. SESAR) or the institutions themselves (e.g. KE EMu).