Historical records and national databases

[mossysal]

I have just been looking at sheet 11687 for Rumex pseudalpinus and comparing the record with the BSBI Distrib maps. There is no record for the relevant hectad, which made me wonder whether there is any machinery for transmitting these vouchered records on H@H, to the NBN for instance?
Sarah

[Tom Humphrey]

Hi Sarah,

It would be good if there were a well-defined mechanism for including herb@home data on the NBN. At present, significant numbers of records from the project do ultimately get included in other integrated databases such as the NBN, probably often without any acknowledgement of the source of the record.

I'm slightly wary about including the full unchecked herb@home data set on the NBN as our data have quite a lot of errors. This isn't a problem per se (and arguably it would be good to expose the data to wider scrutiny), but users of the NBN would need to understand the nature and limitations of the herb@home data and be willing and able to identify mistakes and make corrections. I'd be interested to hear peoples opinions about this. There isn't currently a way to link directly from individual NBN records back to the corresponding herb@home record, but that is probably not a major technical obstacle.

That said, lot's of herb@home data already does end up on the NBN. New records, such as the Rumex pseudalpinus one, may get noticed by vice-county recorders who add the record to their own database.
Quentin Groom has compared herb@home with the maps-scheme data to identify new records and to expand the date-range of existing known hectads. (e.g. http://www.bsbi.org.uk/html/blog.html#Herbarium+Originals )

I am currently working on a new database system that will make many more BSBI records directly web-accessible and which will integrate a number of currently separate datasets. This will include the full herb@home record set. The new system will display hectad maps (similar to the current maps-scheme) but allow you to see the full detail of the underlieing records and allows much more sophisticated search criteria and reporting than is possible with herb@home. I hope to be able to automatically flag new species-hectad occurrences - which would be useful both as a way of spotting interesting records and highlighting mistakes.

regards,

Tom