The Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl) is a comprehensive, community-curated clearing house of information on scientific collections, which builds on previous efforts developed by the Consortium of the Barcode of Life (CBOL) and others.
GRSciColl includes data on institutions, collections and associated staff members and spans all scientific disciplines, including earth and space sciences, anthropology, archaeology, biology and biomedicine, as well as applied fields like agriculture, veterinary medicine and technology.
GRSciColl also serves as the registry for InstitutionCodes and CollectionCodes—elements used in the DarwinCore data standard used in the biodiversity informatics community. Use of these terms enables publications and databases to point unambiguously to collections and their contents.
The main goals of GRSciColl are to:
- Improve access to information about scientific collections, their host institutions as well as contacts for key collections and curatorial staff
- Improve interoperability among databases by providing unique codes and machine-readable identifiers for institutions and collections
The current phase of development has opened the registry to validated users for submissions and edits. Subsequent stages will engage other partners to add functionality like linking collections to specimens, tracking DOI-based citations of collections, and supporting or enhancing various collection metadata schemas.
If you are interested in curating information for your institutions and collections, please contact us at scientific-collections@gbif.org.
GRSciColl data sources and maintenance
Staff members from institutions and collections originally contributed the information contained in GRSciColl, either directly or through partners and predecessors like the NCBI Institution table and Collection table, Biorepositories.org, or the Biodiversity Collections Index.
Maintenance and development of GRSciColl is an ongoing task, and key priorities are outlined in this road map.
GBIF is working with partners to establish a standardized, interoperable flow of information between this registry and other key collections infrastructures. GRSciColl runs a weekly synchronization with Index Herbariorum (IH). Following content migration from iDigBio Collections, GRSciColl shares an integrated registry delivering consistent information with shared editing access to users of both GBIF.org and iDigBio.org.
GBIF has restored community-curation functionality, enabling those working within each of the institutions and collections to help maintain up-to-date information in the registry.