Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2017 - 17

Society Reports
encourage you to as they can be very informative. Numerous
opportunities are also available for training at various scales
as well as competitions for funding to develop new tools and
methods for data mobilization, quality control, and dissemination. I encourage all members to get involved and support
this critical organization!
Please let James know if you have ideas for future collaborations between SPNHC and GBIF.
Respectfully submitted,
James Macklin, SPNHC representative to GBIF

iDigBio
This just in! The folks who curate the
SPNHC wiki and web pages and the
SPNHC Wikipedia page met on August
23, 2017. The two topics of discussion
were developing a process for updating
the digtization links and information
posted at SPNHC and plans to get the
SPNHC Wikipedia page translated into
as many languages as possible. If you
read and write a language other than English, please join this
effort. Thanks!
SPNHC 2017 provided a wonderfully packed schedule of
workshops, short courses, symposia, interest groups, business meetings and of course, field trips! We did not manage
to fit in a Data or Software Carpentry Workshop (we did
try). If you'd like to see either of these at SPNHC-TDWG
2018, please get in touch to collaborate. Materials presented
in these two-day short courses give you a chance to try R,
SQL, Versioning (via GitHub), the command line, better
spreadsheet skills, and tools like Open Refine, in a comfortable, stress-free and fun setting! Try one to find out how these
skills can enhance your data and computational literacy, and
hence your professional development.
Please be sure to check out the NHC Biodiversity Informatics 101 Short Course (NHC BI 101) that was offered June 18,
2017, organized by Jennifer Strotman (Lead and Concept),
Holly Little, and myself. The Entomological Collections
Network (ECN) brought their insights to the NHC BI 101
course too. Thanks ECN! You can read more about iDigBio's
events in the blog post: SPNHC 2017 - The Next Generation
in Best Practices - a perfect fit for iDigBio including iDigBio
Symposia "Advances in Digitization and Innovative Uses for
Collections Data." Some of our iDigBio staff were part of
the session on "Best Practices for Integrating Collections into
Education" brought to you by the Biodiversity Literacy in
Undergraduate Education (BLUE) group (http://www.biodi-

versityliteracy.com/).
I'd like to say an extra special thank you to all SPNHC and
TDWG members who are contributing to the Darwin Core
Hour (DCH) Webinar Series both as presenters and attendees.
To everyone at SPNHC and TDWG, this series needs you if it
is to be successful in its goal to create streamlined, purposeful
communication between the collections community mobilizing data and those developing the standards we need to share
biodiversity data. If you have a Darwin Core (DwC) question,
or would like to submit an idea for a talk, or perhaps suggest
a presenter in the DCH series, please use the DwC Hour Input
Form. Or perhaps you'd like to join the DCH Team and help
us put these together - we're ready to welcome you.
A rather obvious trend, many are now working on discovering and documenting what skills and knowledge are needed
for the 21st century museum staff and those using collections data in research. From technical assistants, to curators,
collection and data managers, from undergrads, to graduate
students and current researchers, many are endeavoring to
collect skills and needs, and to develop materials resources. A
few examples of these efforts include the currently on-going
Strategic Planning for Herbaria Short Course offered by the
Society for Herbarium Curators (SHC), the efforts of BLUE,
the Biodiversity Informatics Curriculum IG at TDWG, and
the work of the ECN to put together resources and a curriculum for entomology collections staff. An exciting time to get
involved, if this topic interests you!
Lastly, iDigBio looks forward to SPNHC-TDWG 2018. We
invite conversation about topics and events well-suited to
taking advantage of this co-meeting. Please, get-in-touch at
dpaul@fsu.edu.
Respectfully submitted, and in anticipation,
Deborah Paul, SPNHC representative to iDigBio

International Society for Biological and
Environmental Repositories
In February 2017, SPNHC signed an
Affiliate Agreement with the International Society for Biological and
Environmental Repositories (ISBER) to
support complementary and overlapping
interests between the two societies.
The ISBER 2017 annual meeting, "Due
North: Aligning Biobanking Practice
with Evolving Evidence and Innovation," was held in Toronto, Canada, May 9-12, 2017. At this meeting, the ISBER
Environmental-Biological Working Group (EBWG), which
September 2017 * 17

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2017