Neil Thomson1 & Markus Döring2
1 Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, United Kingdom.
2 Department of Biodiversity Informatics, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Königin-Luise-Str. 6-8, 14191 Berlin, Germany.
Natural history collections are often very large and for many it will be years before a comprehensive item-level database can be completed. In the meantime, these collections may be overlooked by researchers, if there is no means of finding out about them through the Web.
Natural Collections Descriptions is a new TDWG standard, which has evolved from the collection-level standard developed for the European BioCASE project. It offers a means of describing an entire collection in one record, primarily for resource discovery purposes. NCD is being developed from the specimen-collection basis of BioCASE to cater for any collection of natural history related materials, including library and archive materials and especially those from expeditions and voyages of discovery.
This presentation will provide an introduction to the many uses that may be made of collection description records, the current status of the NCD standard and how it fits with existing information standards.
An NCD Subgroup meeting will be held during the 2005 TDWG Annual Meeting for those who are interested in the development of this standard.
We wish to acknowledge support from the European Commission for the SYNTHESYS BioCASE projects.