User:Ambrosia10/SPNHC2023

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections 2023 Conference (SPNHC2023)

by Siobhan Leachman (User:Ambrosia10) ORCID: 0000-0002-5398-7721

Background

The Wikimedia Foundation provided me with funding to attend in person the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Conference 2023 (SPNHC2023). More about the society can be found here. This conference was held in San Francisco from 28 May to 3rd June and was hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. I arrived on the 27th and left San Francisco on the evening of the 2nd (the 3rd of June was reserved for a field trip).

The conference theme was “Taking the Long View” and organisers encouraged attendees to envision the future for “our field, our collections, and ourselves”.

Pre conference social media and resulting engagement

As I was keen to engage with the wider SPNHC community prior to my attendance at this conference, I kept twitter and telegraph followers updated on the progress of my attempting to gain funding to attend SPNHC2023 from the Wikimedia Foundation, the progress I made drafting and submitting abstracts to the conference organising committee, and my success when my two abstracts and my funding application were accepted. I also posted on Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook both prior to and after my return about the conference.

As a result of this social media engagement, and prior to leaving for the conference, I had a productive meeting with Dr Rachel Walcott, Head of Mineral, Meteorite and Rock collections, National Museums Scotland. Dr Walcott was in Wellington visiting family and was keen to discuss Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikicommons and obtain more in depth knowledge about how natural history collections engage with various Wiki projects, where she and her institution might be able to assist in enriching the content and data contained in the Wiki ecosystem and how her institution might benefit from this sharing. She expressed her desire to share her and her institution's knowledge, particularly about minerals, the expeditions undertaken to obtain minerals for natural history collections and the people who participated in those expeditions and collected the mineral specimens. I was able to give her a general background to how the three projects interlinked, assist her with resources to empower her to learn more and offered her my help as well as contact details if she needed any further support. I also gave her the details of another editor in Edinburgh who may also be able to assist her with her work.

My social media engagement prior to the conference also ensured I was able to make contact with another Wikidata editor Dario Taraborelli, a co-organiser of the Wikidata WikiProject:Biodiversity. We arranged a meeting when I arrived in San Francisco enabling us to catch up, strategise and discuss progress with the WikiProject as well as possible plans for a Wikidata:WikiProject Biodiversity event enabling the community to come together to discuss the various workflows and tools used by members of the group to improve and enrich biodiversity data in Wikidata.

SPNHC2023

My conference presentations with links

Names, dames and campaigns: a botanical case study in digitally narrowing the gaps (Youtube start at 35min 30s point)

Reuse in the Wiki world empowers engagement with Natural History Collections (Youtube video start at 1hr 34min 30s point)

Overall impression of the conference

One of the main topics that I observed being discussed during the conference was the digital extended specimen, the data standards needed to implement the digital extended specimen concept, and practical workflows that can be used by those working with collections to create or improve a digital extended specimen network of knowledge.

A digital extended specimen is a findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable (FAIR) digital representation of the physical specimen. It contains data about the specimen and then in turn is linked to data/samples derived from the curated physical specimen itself (e.g., computed tomography (CT) scan imagery, DNA sequences or tissue samples), to directly related specimens or data about the organism's life (e.g., specimens of parasites collected from it, photos or recordings of the organism in life, immediate surrounding ecological community), and the wide range of associated specimen-independent data sets and model-based contextualisations (e.g.collector and determiner information and identifiers, taxonomic information, conservation status, bio climatological region, remote sensing images, environmental-climatological data, traditional knowledge, genome annotations).

A basic example of a digital extended specimen can be seen by running this Wikidata query.

During SPNHC2023 the digital extended specimen and the practical considerations on how to implement this concept was a hot topic with many of the presentations I attended raising workflows that could feed into it or giving practical examples of how to implement the concept.

Collection management system presentations outlined actions their developers are making or plan to make to allow more linking of data, empowering the creation of digital extended specimens. Other natural history institutions gave presentations about their work attempting to digitise, image and data process specimens and their preparation for the future of the digital extended specimen.

The Biodiversity Data Standards community (TDWG) have been working to create biodiversity data standards to help empower the creation of digital extended specimens. One relevant standard is Darwin Core, the developing standard intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing identifiers, labels, and definitions. This standard helped inspire much discussion on how it might guide those in the community wanting to undertake digital extended specimen work.

I particularly valued the discussions on the digital extended specimen during the two GBIF workshops I attended at the start of the conference. GBIF is currently working on a unified data model attempting to implement the Darwin Core standard. Attending the GBIF workshops gave me a more practical understanding of the challenges in implementing the Darwin Core standard through aggregators such as GBIF and the potential advantages in advancing biodiversity knowledge should this implementation become more widespread.

The first workshop was the “GBIF Unified data model for mobilizing and sharing collections data”. The attendees were split into three groups and I attended the group where we discussed the TDWG data standard Darwin Core and the proposed methods that GBIF is intending to undertaken to empower collections to use this standard to create digital extended specimens. This discussion was wide ranging and dealt more with the overarching concepts. I was particularly keen to discuss the “round tripping” of data to enable natural history collections to not just create a digital extended specimen but also allow that data to be continually built up and improved upon.

The second workshop in the afternoon was “GBIF - Making Your Collections Data Discoverable”. This workshop was much more practical and extended my knowledge on how natural history institutions should prepare their collection data to facilitate it being added into GBIF. This workshop discussed the global registry of scientific collections, the code of which can and is being added to Wikidata items for natural history collections. It also discussed Latimore Core, a TDWG generated data standard for collection descriptions.

Important and educational presentations were also given in the “Narrowing the Gaps: The role of digital infrastructure in shortening the distance between physical collections and their derivative research products” session. This portion of the conference was particularly helpful to me as not only did my knowledge about the Digital Extended Specimen increase, I was exposed to the challenges natural history collection practitioners face in ensuring that their data, their collection management systems and the methods they use to share their data, are able to empower the creation of digital extended specimens. Many natural history collections are still in the process of being digitised with some collections simply aiming to achieve the recommended minimum information about a digital specimen (another TDWG created Biodiversity Data Standard see MIDS standard).

This understanding of the challenges faced by natural history institutions is important as Wikidata items are recommended to be used in the digital extended specimen as one of the identifiers to digitally connect the people who collected or identified the physical specimen. I was pleased to see that during this conference Wikidata seems to have achieved general acceptance as an identifier for people and is being used or is being proposed to be used by multiple institutions to assist with disambiguating their people data. This was a pleasing development from this community compared to even 5 years ago when the knowledge about Wikidata was generally lacking.

I can also see the potential for Wikidata to assist with the digital extended specimen effort in other ways. Examples include acting as a gazetteer, that is providing names and coordinates of geographical locations in multiple languages, acting as a hub for database links relating to taxa and assisting with the linking of scholarly publications dealing with biodiversity.

I admit that as I spend a lot of my Wikidata editing time disambiguating people who are collectors and/or determiners of specimens, authors of natural history publications and scientific illustrators, it was the “people linking” role that Wikidata plays in the digital extended specimen that excited me the most. Particularly as attendees at the conference frequently mentioned the website/tool Bionomia Track that I and others use to extend the impact of placing a person in Wikidata.

My presentation on “Names, dames and campaigns: a botanical case study in digitally narrowing the gaps” helped highlight how Wikidata can be used to ensure people data is created, enriched and then pushed out to communities that want to reuse these data, during the research process. As a result of giving this presentation, I had a discussion with Miranda Lowe from the Natural History Museum, London on how this workflow could be used to highlight the contributions of other marginalised groups, such as people of colour or indigenous collectors.

This was the other main topic I observed being discussed and presented on during the conference, that is the proactive effort needed to be undertaken by natural history collections to highlight the contributions of and support the engagement by people from marginalised groups.

Many of the presentations in the “Broadening Access and Use of Natural History Collections Through Innovative Approaches and Engagement” session emphasised that natural history collections needed to make efforts to recognise and acknowledge the contributions made by people from marginalised groups to natural history collections. Presentations emphasised that many people from marginalised groups have historically been uncredited for their contributions. Other presentations gave information on the efforts being made by natural history collections to engage with people from marginalised groups. These two efforts in my opinion feed off each other and assist each other in ensuring natural history collections both recognise and engage with more diverse communities.

My presentation on “Reuse in the Wiki world empowers engagement with Natural History Collections” gave examples of institutions that had undertaken Wiki work with the aim of ensuring marginalised groups obtained access to knowledge or obtained credit for their contributions to natural history collections. This presentation inspired several conversations from attendees undertaking work to gain more representation by and credit for underrepresented groups including with Adania Flemming, the founder of the group Black in Natural History Museums.

Personal Conference highlights

Workshops

As explained above, the GBIF workshops were extremely valuable to me in increasing my knowledge about GBIF, the various data standards discussed and implemented and the extended digital specimen concept.

Plenary Session

There were three keynote speakers. Of these I was particularly interested in Anna Monfils presentation on “Extending Biodiversity Collections: Engaging an inclusive biodiversity science community through research, education and workforce training.” This presentation outlined many of the concepts, topics and issues that were later raised and discussed in the two most influential (to me) conference symposia I attended - the Narrowing the Gaps and the Broadening Access and Use of Biodiversity Collections.

Conference symposia

As explained above the two most influential conference symposia I attended during the conference were the two that I presented in. The “Narrowing the Gaps: The role of digital infrastructure in shortening the distance between physical collections and their derivative research products” symposia had several really interesting presentations including:

Connecting Users with Natural History and Cultural Heritage via Linked Data Jessica Utrup, Kelly Davis, Dr Robert Sanderson In this presentation Jessica Utrup and Kelly Davis explained that Yale University has developed a standards-based discovery platform (LUX) that links collections from the Peabody Natural History Museum, its two art museums, libraries, archives, and special collections. The LUX platform uses Linked Open Data, unique identifiers, to connect between resources in a graph of knowledge. Unsurprisingly one of the identifiers it uses is the Wikidata Qid. This LUX platform was also interesting as its approach, like Wikidata, will ensure the various collections are better linked and searches of these collections will be better able to assist researchers and others to make connections across the institution’s collections, archives, libraries and museums.

How quickly can new accessions generate citations of a collection? Dr. Thomas McElrath Dr McElrath gave a really interesting presentation on how quickly natural history specimens lead to scholarly citations and attribution of the collection, and therefore, increased attention and funding for these collections. In analysing the data from his collection he made recommendations including ensuring natural history collection specimen datasets had DOIs and then loan agreements as well as scholarly publishers requiring that scholars “Cite the DOI” to ensure the value of Natural history collections to research is reflected.

Integrating for the future: towards a common global research agenda Dr Vincent Smith Dr Smith gave a thought provoking presentation on the big biodiversity data integration problems that the community currently have and how the community is trying to align those problems with some of the big challenges facing science and society, specifically the twin challenges of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. He discussed the COP15 meeting and stated that the four goals and 23 targets directly connect to the natural history collection field. He pointed out the ambiguity of the targets. For example, what does “areas of particular biodiversity importance” mean? He argues that governments don’t really know and that they need the help of the natural history collection community to define these types of terms and also to give them information to make judgements. He asked what the natural history collection community needs to do to help the implementation of COP15 targets? He argues the natural history community provides data - that natural history collections are the unique source of historical baseline information about the distribution of species on this planet. From that data coupled with observation data currently being generated, the natural history collection community can help give predictions about biodiversity. But this needs cooperation and data integration amongst the disparate collections. He argued that in the UK and EU DiSSCo efforts are helping to provide a network to support cooperation and data integration and that the world community are also coming together to help support these aims.

He asked whether the community's information management systems are ready for this challenge. He explained how the community is undertaking work on this issue, giving the extended digital specimen work being undertaken by GBIF as an example. But he also went on to explain two main challenges he sees that will be important in the future - community curation and the ability to take advantage of AI. He explained that the issue of community curation requires round tripping of data and improvements to that data not just to the institution that supplied the data but also to other users who would then be able to take advantage of that improvement. He wants a shared knowledge base of information and with everyone having the opportunity to co-create and co-edit. One of the many data sources he then showed on his slide included Wikidata as well as Bionomia which makes use of Wikidata items. He then went on to discuss AI and the use of it to help cluster data assisting in the building of links across data and helping improve and enrich data across huge datasets.

Overall I was impressed by the number of presentations that mentioned Wikidata either in the presentation itself or in their presentation slides. Wikidata is definitely being used more by this community helping to enrich their collection management systems, improve/assist in the cleaning of their data and/or improving the knowledge linked to in the digital extended specimens.

One of the challenges mentioned in some of the presentations during this symposium was the lack of digital skills in the current natural history institution workforce as well as lack of funds to support the development of digital skills. This had me thinking that in order to empower more reuse and enrichment of Wikidata within natural history institutions their employees will need to be trained on how to edit Wikidata, both manually and in bulk (such as through OpenRefine). Assisting with training would be a way to both encourage natural history institutions to enrich and reuse Wikidata but would also have the benefit of assisting these institutions with the upskilling of their staff in digital skills.

The “Broadening Access and Use of Natural History Collections Through Innovative Approaches and Engagement” symposium also had several very interesting presentations including Broadening Representation in Natural History Collections through mentorship, community building and intentional education strategies Mrs Adania Flemming In this presentation Mrs Flemming explained the methodology she is using to help answer the questions “What are the experiences of historically excluded people in NHMs” and “How can we use these experiences to build healthy communities to engage and retain historically excluded people in Natural History Collections?" She emphasised how important it is to be able to see marginalised people and their contributions represented within Natural History Collections and discussed how representation in museums is tied to the ideals and types of knowledge shared within museums as well as the presence of role models within natural history collection institutions.

Addressing legacies of racism and colonialism in Natural History Collections Rebekah Kim, Yolanda Bustos Kim and Bustos advocated reexamining the history of science and natural history museums to tell more transparent and accurate histories about museums, collections and science. They looked at what next steps the natural history community can take to build on existing initiatives and address the legacies of racism and colonialism in order to begin repairing harm in our institutions. Kim gave the example of her work on “Telling the whole story: Colonial history & UntoldStories”. She also talked about how she and colleagues gave presentations on the colonial history of the California Academy of Science and the feedback she received on how important these efforts were to students and visitors from marginalised groups. Bustos then presented on what she and Kim were planning for next steps. She discussed looking for harmful content within collections for example legacy descriptions, collection records about violent histories, exclusion in collecting practices. She suggests revising language or providing additional context in these situations. She talked about previous efforts by members of the natural history community to highlight the colonial pasts of institutions and collections but encouraged everyone to prioritise this work through including it within collection management processes and workflows.

These efforts need to be realistic in scope, systematic and scalable. Examples she gave were the creation of harmful content statements. Another example she gave was for institutions to prioritise revising smaller subsets of their collection to use as a proof of concept. She recommends the use of the conscious style guide and the diversity style guide when editing collection metadata and descriptions. This work can also provide an opportunity to engage with the public and the marginalised groups by creating community advisory councils but she points out there should be a reciprocal exchange of labour with meaningful compensation. She also recommends creating multi-institutional networks to assist with this effort.

Communicating GUIDs: From Explorable Explanation to BLUE Module Vicky Chan Dr. Elizabeth Ellwood, Molly Phillips, Cat Chapman, Katie Pearson, Dr. Makenzie Mabry, Dr. Anna Monfils, Dr. Debra Linton Chan explained what Global Unique identifiers are and then went on to outline the steps she had taken to create resources to teach people about GUIDs and their importance. She explained how these resources were then used to create an education module in BLUE (Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education). This education resource was intended to educate students about what GUIDs are and have hands-on experience in using them and natural history collection databases. She explained how she used the backwards design principles where you think about the goals first that students needed to achieve and then think about the design of the activity in order to empower the students to achieve those goals.

The first two presentations mentioned above inspired me to think how various Wiki projects could be used to assist and highlight this work and the contributions of these members of the natural history community. Obviously using publications created and published by and as a result of these efforts could be used to help highlight both this work and the people it celebrates. Also the attitude of being mindful about harmful content and providing context is as relevant to the Wiki community as it is for natural history collection folk.

The GUIDs presentation brought home the importance of training natural history collection workers about data, linking of data, and database identifiers. Also the “backwards design” of the course mentioned was an interesting approach that could work for Wiki training courses.

Poster highlight

On the conference virtual platform there were multiple posters on display. My personal highlight was the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History’s Collections Histories for Accountability and Transparency (CHAT) Project To see more on the CHAT project see this video. This project and the poster showed a great practical example of the work being done within natural history collections to highlight the contributions of underrepresented people.

Discussions with attendees

One of the report back metrics I was asked to measure was my engagement with attendees of SPNHC2023. I was to have at least 5 conversations with different attendees regarding various Wiki projects. I managed to exceed this aim as the morning, lunch and afternoon tea breaks provided fertile ground for multiple discussions ranging in scope from how Wiki editors might help with the extinction crisis and how Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikicommons might be used to enrich digital extended specimens, down to assisting attendees with Wiki editing issues and creating or showing how to create Wikidata items for attendees on request.

Just some of the conversations I had included:

Ben Hill from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - He presented on “Are Herbaria Museums? Kew’s journey towards Museum Accreditation”. After his presentation I asked him why the UK accreditors do not appear to take into account the digital presence of an institution and their collections, let alone whether the institution openly licences their digital content for reuse. This sparked off a decision about the importance of open licensing for Wiki projects. I urged him to consider giving feedback to the UK museum accreditation agency during and after the accreditation process. I asked him to advocate for them to adapt their criteria to take digital access to museums collections as well as the open licensing of collections to enable reuse in account when evaluating or reevaluating museums for accreditation.
Randal Singer from University of Michigan - I had a discussion with him as he is a Wikipedia editor and was having difficulty sorting out an incorrectly identified image in Wikicommons being placed on an incorrect Wikipedia page. He explained that although the image was named down to a species level in Wikicommons he, as an expert on this species, was only able to identify the image to genus level and that it was likely an undescribed species. As a result he and I were of the opinion it shouldn’t be used in the Wikipedia and Wikidata items associated with the species. I tutored him in how to resolve this issue and how to alert other editors to ensure the image was not used on the incorrect species page.
Ely Wallis, Collections Community Engagement Manager at Atlas of Living Australia and current president of TDWG. Ely and I had an over two hour long conversation ranging over numerous topics including the digital extended specimen concept, how Wiki projects might feed into this, and practical difficulties institutions may have in implementing “round tripping” of enriched data. We also discussed the Biodiversity Heritage Library white paper outlining BHL’s strategy with regard to Wiki Projects, various TDWG data standards and how these may affect Wikidata data schema and whether I would be attending the TDWG conference in Hobart. We discussed my presentations - particularly the women genera paper, and I gained more knowledge on the work Ely does at the Atlas of Living Australia.
Thomas McElrath, Illinois Natural History Survey - We had a general discussion about specimen collectors and identifiers, the use of Wikidata items, enriching the same then adding them to Bionomia to link collectors and identifiers of specimens to the specimens themselves. Tommy advocated for more women entomologists to be added to Wikidata and Wikipedia after attending my presentation on our “Women genera” research project.
Deb Paul, Biodiversity Informatics Community Liaison at Species File Group and ex president of TDWG. Deb and I had multiple discussions during the conference about how best to narrow the digital gaps with an emphasis on using Wikidata for person data, workflows of using biographical and genealogy research in order to assist with the digital extended specimen as well as to ensure that contributors to natural history institutions obtain credit for their contributions.
Maarten Trekels, Meise Botanic Garden, Meise, Belgium and DiSSCo Flanders. I had previously collaborated with Maarten during the 2021 BiCIKL hackathon. I was part of the Project 9:Hidden Women team that worked on finding “hidden women” and added them to Wikidata, Wikipedia, Bionomia and to the website Science Stories. See this link for more information. We had several discussions of hidden figures, the work he is undertaking via DiSSCo and also on the use of Wikidata as an identifier for people.
Jack Ashby, University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, United Kingdom - We had a discussion about his Wikipedia editing and him wanting to share his expertise with Wikipedia and the best way to go about this. He has edited Wikipedia previously and we discussed conflict of interest, and I offered help if ever he needs it.
Vincent Smith, Natural History Museum, London - We had an in depth discussion about the extended digital specimen, the general concepts of linked open data, where he saw the practical efforts of collection institutions to help provide data to combat the extinction crisis might be concentrated and the effect of those efforts on the availability of data. I found his insights very enlightening coming as they did after his presentation that I discussed earlier in this document.
Miranda Lowe, Natural History Museum, London - We discussed my presentation on the women genera project and our workflow of raising the visibility of women via Wikidata. Miranda was keen to investigate our methods with a view to using Wikidata to raise the profile of other marginalised groups such as indigenous people and people of colour who have contributed to Natural history collections.
Adania Flemming - I am currently collaborating with Adania on created a course based undergraduate experience (CURE) called “Hidden Figures” which contains a Wikidata workflow helping to raise the visibility of under represented people but I also offered to help should she need content created in Wikidata or Wikipedia for the Black in Natural History Museums initiative.
Martin Kalfatovic, Associate Director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Digital Programs and Initiatives, and is the coordinator for the Libraries’ participation in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. I had multiple conversations with Martin about BHL but most relevant to the various Wiki projects was the discussion we had about the Biodiversity Heritage Library white paper outlining BHL’s strategy with regard to Wiki Projects.

During the conference I also undertook outreach via tweets in sessions explaining presentations of interest as well as highlighting each of my presentations prior to my delivery of the same.

After the Conference.

As part of my outreach efforts I created a Linkedin post explaining my two SPNHC presentations. This resulted in the history of science and botany professor Dr Lisa Delisso reaching out to me regarding a scholarly article she had written on a previously overlooked botanist and botanical collector named Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner. I had previously added this botanist and botanical collector to Wikidata and then used that Wikidata item to add her to Bionomia. I had then spent time attributing specimens to her on that platform. Dr Delisson contacted me to thank me for my work, request that I add more “also know as” names to Horner’s Wikidata item and to explain that she was citing the Bionomia profile of this collector generated by my Wikidata editing and attribution efforts in her publication. I was very gratified to see that the Wikidata work I helped contribute to has assisted this professor in her research and I also pasted this information on the Bionomia’s creator David Shorthouse. This lead to David improving Bionomia by creating a process to add DOIs to each deceased creator’s profile page enabling scholars to more easily cite Bionomia.

Anticipated follow up actions.

I aim to share this conference report on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, the Wikidata WikiProject Biodiversity telegram group, the Wellington and Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand meet-ups, on the WikiProject New Zealand talk page and in the GLAMwiki newsletter .

I intend to keep in contact with many of the attendees of the conference via social media including on the platforms Twitter, Telegram, Slack, and Mastodon. I have previously met or became aware of many of the SPNHC2023 attendees via my attending virtual workshops dealing with biodiversity data or institutional/project based Wikidata workshops or participating in the projects themselves, as well as attending or presenting at other conferences both in person or virtually.

By attending this conference physically I have had the opportunity to meet or re-engage with many folk in this community in person. This has helped strengthen these relationships. As a result of meeting folk in person I believe many will now be more comfortable in reaching out to me should they have queries or need assistance with Wiki projects.

I also anticipate attending the upcoming TDWG 2023 conference on the 9-13 October in Hobart, Australia. In previous work with the TDWG community I have contributed to the person data standard and have been a joint author on multiple publications surrounding this recommended data standard. As a result I have received several queries from other attendees at the SPNHC2023 conference on whether I would be attending the TDWG 2023 conference in Hobart.

Thanking the Wikimedia Foundation

Lastly I would like to thank the Wikimedia Foundation for providing me with funding to attend this conference. Attending physically empowered me to present two presentations highlighting the work that can be done in Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikicommons that benefits the natural history community, it empowered me to engage with people face to face, enriching my ongoing relationships with members of this community. I was able to make new friendships with attendees and was able to advocate for the open sharing and reuse of knowledge. I gained a better understanding of the needs of this community as well as how their knowledge and insight might be used to enrich the Wiki world.