Tangled Bank Seminar - we are welcoming Dr Sabine von Mering visiting us in person from the Museum für Naturkunde of Berlin, Germany.
Sabine was a visiting researcher for our UiO core research infrastructure helpdesk project.
The title of Sabine von Mering's Tangled Bank talk:
Towards an open knowledge infrastructure: Digitising and linking the collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
The seminar was on Thursday the 29th of February, from 14:00 to 15:00, in the Auditorium of Lids Hus (the botanical building) at Tøyen Campus. (It was streamed via Zoom).
Here is a summary of the talk:
Natural history museums around the world are digitizing and opening up their collections, thus mobilizing huge amounts of data. This development provides exciting opportunities for researchers but also creates new challenges for research data management. In the seminar, I will present the ongoing process of collection disclosure and development at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), one of the largest natural history museums in Germany. This process includes efforts to conserve, digitally catalogue, and digitize specimens from the fields of zoology, paleontology, mineralogy, and botany but also to open up and link to related sources such as publications, archival material, and other entities. Wikidata is used as a hub for stable identifiers but also supports transparency and access to information linked to the museum. By publishing and sharing these data openly via different portals and platforms, by using open participatory formats such as edit-a-thons, and by engaging different stakeholders in co-creation, we aim to develop an open knowledge infrastructure for all.
More about Sabine von Mering's research interests can be found here:
- Her ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2982-7792
- Website giving some insights related to a project on "collection agents" linked to the museum in Berlin.
- Two WikiProject pages related to the work on collection agents and the collaborative work on research expeditions.
