USING DIGITIZED DATA TO IDENTIFY NEW RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN MUSEUM DRAWERS

Museums have embraced the role of digital data provider, disseminating taxonomic information and occurrence data in standardized formats as well as 2D and 3D representations of specimens and associated archival data. A driving force behind museum digitization efforts is the hope that these data, once standardized and web-mobilized, will inspire novel analyses and syntheses. Additionally, the existence of these digital resources allow museums and other stakeholders to more readily identify areas of common interest.

Digitized museum data often represent orders of magnitude more and frequently novel occurrence data that are not found in the published record. However, using these data is challenging because the age of the data and methods of compilation are frequently unknown. While this phenomenon is well known, comparatively little attention has focused on ways to identify information gaps between the published record and museum collections to target these gaps for research.

Using data from four recently funded digitization efforts in California paleontology as examples, freely available mapping software was used to graphically explore overlapping data sets drawn from compilations of published literature (e.g., Paleobiology Database, FAUNMAP/Neotoma) and the newly-digitized museum data. Exploration of areas of data non-overlap highlight both small and larger-scale projects that represent “low hanging fruit” for targeted research. At a minimum, these data gaps highlight areas where the scope of collections and related documentation need to be introduced into the peer-reviewed literature to provide a way to identify resources for use in education and future research. The resulting data-oriented publications that integrate available non-digital and digital data sources are key to improving the quality of web-mobilized data for researchers and other stakeholders. Reciprocally, joint exploration of museum data and public data compilations with well-documented taxonomic opinion sets like the Paleobiology Database also provide an effective way to track taxonomic changes and incorporate updates into research or museum workflows.