Siya Zamisa (Research Technician) in the Natural Science department shares some insight into some of what he does in his job.
One of the most important aspects of the museum is to share information. Departments like the Natural Science Department strives to do just that with its collections. One of the mandates for the Natural Science Department is to publish its collections that fall under its umbrella to the free access data sharing platforms such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). GBIF is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments that aims at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on earth. Amongst other things that I do at the museum as a Data Technician, is to publish and update our collections through GBIF’s Integrated Publishing Tool (IPT) platform. For that one requires a dataset (source data) in a form of a spreadsheet which will be added in the IPT when creating what we call a resource for that dataset.
Exporting data to be published through GBIF
This is what the IPT platform looks like.
Resources the Department has created and published.
Example of how the published data looks in the GBIF IPT.
The best thing about GBIF is that anyone from anywhere will have access to all the types of data.
