GBIF TRAINING MANUAL 1: DIGITIZATION OF NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS DATA.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a worldwide network that makes primary, scientific, biodiversity data (documented species occurrence data) from many sources openly available via the Internet. It does this by building an information infrastructure that interconnects hundreds of databases, and by promoting the digitisation and sharing of data that are not currently available via the Internet, such as those associated with specimens in natural history museums. This promotion of digitisation is approached in a number of ways: seed money awards to stimulate digitisation projects; the development (with partners) of community-accepted standards for data and metadata, as well as software tools that enable interconnectivity and interoperability; workshops for training in digitisation and data-sharing; and guides such as this training manual and its components. GBIF’s hope is to help collections and database personnel around the world share best practices in the tasks and operations required in building a web-based, global “natural history collection and herbarium” that can be accessed any time any where by any one via the Internet.