ORKNEY
BIODIVERSITY RECORDS CENTRE
About Us
A Brief Resume of the Biodiversity Records Centre
by Sydney Gauld
Late in 1998 a team of specialists took on the three-year-task of computerising
the mass of Orkney's biological records, a mammoth project which had already had
its groundwork laid by Orkney Field Club.
The team consisted of Ross Andrew as manager and Dianne Learmonth, Linda Bartlett and myself as part-time technicians.
The work was done using the database Recorder 3.3 to store the records and involved firstly building a site hierarchy before entering data. By the end of the period we had entered 88,969 records onto 3.3, mostly by hand, though a number came in by computer imports, these records relating to 1,825 sites. The groups represented in this included fungi, lichens, moss & liverworts, vascular plants, beetles, true flies, dragonflies, stone flies, May flies, caddis flies, bumble bees, spiders and birds.
It was at this time that a new recording package was introduced called Recorder 2000, more commonly known as R2K, which by the end of the three year period contained a substantial number of marine records from MNCR. At the end of the project the records in 3.3 were transferred to R2K giving a combined total of 136,156 records.
During this time several courses were run to promote recording and increase people's knowledge in subjects ranging from the microscopic to mammals. The OBRC gathered together a wide range of equipment for people to use, ranging from laboratory to field sampling equipment, and Orkney Field Club also acquired a wide range of natural history reference books which are now in the care of the OBRC.
There was a gap of several months after May 2001 when OBRC went into a care and maintenance spell, and the equipment and books were moved up into The Orkney Library, Laing Street, queries being dealt with by myself. However by October that year I had been re-employed as a part-time technician and things were moving forward again.
So what Now?
I am learning the quirks of R2K, checking the data already entered to make certain that the data transfer worked properly and looking at the addition of marine sites into the existing sites hierarchy of R2K.Data will then be electronically imported into R2K either directly from other R2K applications or via import wizard from Excel spreadsheets or text files. (To this end there will need to be a close working relationship with county recorders to get their data into a format that can easily be transferred. Even with the ability to import records directly into the database there will still be some that will have to be done by hand.)
If you would like to get in contact with us at the OBRC with a database query or
to use the reference books
or the equipment, we can be contacted at
The Orkney Library & Archive, 44 Junction Road, Kirkwall, Orkney, KW15 1AG.
Tel: 01856 873166