Bringing visibility to earth sciences collections in Switzerland

The publication of data from earth science collections is currently not possible via the national aggregator DAGI developed during the SwissCollNet initiative. The publication pipeline that could be adopted for earth sciences collections remains to be thought through and validated by the earth sciences collections community. To this purpose, the aim of the workshop was to clarify the needs and define actions required for bringing visibility to earth sciences collections and data of Swiss institutions within the framework of SwissCollNet and beyond.

Around 40 participants representing 15 Swiss institutions and organisations (as well as 2 international institutions) attended the event.

Three international speakers were invited to the event (slides available in the right panel).

• Developments at European level were presented by Laura Tilley, head of the working group for earth sciences at CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities). She presented the GeoCASe portal as well as the general landscape of earth science collections publication in Europe.
  
• Olle Hints, Professor and Head of Bedrock Geology and Collections at TALTECH – Estonia, presented the Estonia use case with the SARV information system and associated portals (https://datacite.ee/en/sarv-2/; https://geoloogia.info/en) as well as the history of the system’s development.
  
  
• Ben Norton, developer, data scientist and collections data curator involved in TDWG (the organization and a community dedicated to developing biodiversity information standards) presented his development of the data mobilization platform GeoSpecimens.org.
  

In order to provide an overview of the situation regarding earth science collections in Switzerland, the participating institutions then presented their collections and their current status of digitisation and publication (slides available in the right panel).

Finally, participants discussed in groups a series of questions aimed at achieving the workshop's objective for the day, namely to clarify the needs and define the measures required to improve the visibility of Swiss institutions' Earth science collections and data. The following three topics were addressed:

• Which data for whom and what?
• What difficulties, what solutions, with what system?
• What to aim for with which resources?

> See the detailed list of questions

The results and thoughts from this workshop, together with the institutions' responses to a follow-up questionnaire, will enable to define the next steps for improving the visibility of the earth science collections in Swiss institutions.

> See the follow-up questionnaire sent to participating institutions