This module introduces students and instructors to Bionomia, a database that highlights the collectors and identifiers of natural history specimens. It aims to foster appreciation for these individuals, including historically underrepresented groups, and guides students in attributing specimens to collectors, offering insights into their contributions to science.
Slides and attached script for a presentation delivered to the Te Papa natural history team explaining how to use ORCID, Wikidata and Bionomia to link both living and deceased Te Papa natural history collectors and determiners to their specimens. It explains how this linking, the creation of Bionomia profiles for Te Papa staff, and the integration of those Bionomia profiles with Zenodo, can be used by Te Papa staff to help obtain professional credit for their work. It also explains how these workflows can be used to enrich Te Papa’s person data more generally, ensuring it can be improved prior and subsequent to export into GBIF. This presentation also outlines how this improvement will prepare Te Papa’s person data for use in digital extended specimens.
Bionomia is a database that quantifies the contributions of individual taxonomists. Specimens identified. Specimens collected. Downstream publications helped.
This is a noble effort. The labor of taxonomists undergirds much of modern biology but is often invisible, urecognized by our current system of academic career rewards, and as a result taxonomists are constantly struggling for support.