Invited talk given at The Natural History Museum, London, 17 March 2009 (I gave a very similar talk at the Department of Zoology, University of Stockholm, 12 March 2009).

1. Going Digital
Rod Page
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

2. If you are not online you are
invisible
(Web 1.0)

3. All useful information will be
online
(Web 1.0)

4. Value is explicit and based on
usage (links)
(Web 1.0)

5. Reputation is created…
(Web 2.0)

6. …not conferred by authority
(Web 2.0)

7. Everything will have a URL
(Web 3.0)

8. Yes, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid

9. …but I’m not alone

10. Social networking

11. Dinosaurs ban it

12. Scaremongers say it causes
cancer

15. Some “get it”

17. Some do real work with it

18. #uksnow

19. @kzelnioCould you do me a favour:
10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.12.017

20. Where is the
(digital) museum?
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

21. www.nhm.ac.uk

22. Zoology

23. This dataset is not accessible by the
public. For more information please
contact the Department of Zoology.

24. Silo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenmccown/132990634/

25. 404

26. GBIF
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisfreeland/3306689322/

27. Top 10 GBIF data providers

28. League table
Museum GBIF data Open access Staff Social
journal publications Networking
online
Twitter,
yes
3,446,016 Facebook,
Youtube, etc.
(searchable
yes
collections) (Twitter)
412,797 (planned)
(planned)

29. Why go digital?
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

30. Diverse kinds of data

31. Apomys datae

34. Apomys specimen

36. How do we integrate these data?

37. Why integrate?

38. Learn stuff we don’t know

39. • There are knownknowns, things we know that we
know
• There are knownunknowns, things we now know
we don’t know
• But there are also unknownunknowns, things we
do not know we don't know

40. Unknown knowns

41. Things we know
…without knowing that we know

42. Melissotarsus insularis

43. 1
Melissotarsus insularis no hit
Melissotarsus insularis CASENT0107663-D01
CASENT0107663-D01 DQ176312
DQ176312 Melissotarsus sp. BLF m1
=
Melissotarsus sp. BLF m1 Melissotarsus insularis

44. No one source has all the
answers

45. Joining the dots

46. Identifiers

47. Digital Object Identifier
(DOI)

49. Identifies a publication

50. Globally unique

51. 10.1016/j.ympev.2006.04.006

52. Paper

53. Why have DOIs?

54. Link rot

55. Refs

56. Cites
2006
2006

57. Forward Cites
2006 2009

58. Shoulders of giants

59. progress is incremental

60. reuse past results

61. Forward Cites
2006 2008

63. Species
Genes

64. data linking

65. data citation

66. http://iphylo.org/~rpage/challenge

67. demo

68. Vision

69. Chromiscircumaurea

75. What should
museums do?
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

76. Do nothing
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

77. The new

78. Don’t try this at home
• Image storage (Flickr)
• Video storage (YouTube, Vimeo)
• Bibliographies (Connotea, Mendeley)
• Social networking (Facebook, Twitter)
• Annotation (CMS, Wikis, Blogs)
• Bulk storage (Amazon S3)
• Bulk computing (Amazon EC2)

79. Make it easy
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

80. http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/2256358640/

81. http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/treeview.html

82. http://abacus.gene.ucl.ac.uk/software/paml.html

83. http://mrbayes.csit.fsu.edu/

84. http://www.tree-puzzle.de/

85. http://atgc.lirmm.fr/phyml/

86. No branding

87. No corporate style

88. No permission needed

89. Institution provides
infrastructure…

90. …then gets out of the way

91. Top five European papers in
evolutionary biology 1996-2006
1,118 – 4,512 citations

92. Partnerships
(EOL)
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

93. “Dance of the initiatives”
Christine Hine

94. Danger of too much money

96. Million Dollar Page

99. EOL in it’s present form

100. sucks

101. Can I do science with it?

102. Not yet…

103. Intellectual
Property
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

104. Fear

105. Ignorance

106. Silo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenmccown/132990634/

107. AMNH Conditions
1. Except as otherwise expressly stated herein, the information, records, or images
in these databases may not be reproduced, distributed, or publicly displayed, in
whole or in part, without the express written permission of the American
Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
2. AMNH does not grant permission for anyone to use, download, reproduce,
publicly display, distribute, or reprint all or substantially all of the information,
records, or images in the database.
3. Subsets of the information, records, or images in the database may be used,
downloaded, reproduced, publicly displayed, distributed, or reprinted strictly for
educational, scientific, scholarly, and other non-profit uses provided that AMNH
is appropriately cited as the source of the information.
4. Subsets of the records from the database downloaded for use with data from
other data sets must be clearly identified by the attribution “AMNH.”
5. Data are provided to individual users with the understanding that said data will
not be passed on to third parties or redistributed, except with approval from
AMNH.
6. …

108. 2. AMNH does not grant permission
for anyone to use, download,
reproduce, publicly display,
distribute, or reprint all or
substantially all of the
information, records, or images in
the database.

109. Elachistocleisovalis
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lleonebio/3328398741/

113. You know more than the AMNH
database does!

114. DQ283405
FEATURES Location/Qualifiers
source 1..2400
/organism=quot;Elachistocleisovalisquot;
/organelle=quot;mitochondrionquot;
/mol_type=quot;genomic DNAquot;
/specimen_voucher=quot;AMNH A141136quot;
/db_xref=quot;taxon:367647quot;
/country=quot;Guyana: Dubulay Ranch on
the Berbice River, 200ft,
5'40'55N, 57'51'32Wquot;
misc_RNA<1..>2400
/note=quot;contains 12S ribosomal RNA,
tRNA-Val, and 16S ribosomal RNAquot;

115. Tens of thousands of copies all
around the world

116. AMNH Conditions
1. Except as otherwise expressly stated herein, the information, records, or images
in these databases may not be reproduced, distributed, or publicly displayed, in
whole or in part, without the express written permission of the American
Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
2. AMNH does not grant permission for anyone to use, download, reproduce,
publicly display, distribute, or reprint all or substantially all of the information,
records, or images in the database.
3. Subsets of the information, records, or images in the database may be used,
downloaded, reproduced, publicly displayed, distributed, or reprinted strictly for
educational, scientific, scholarly, and other non-profit uses provided that AMNH
is appropriately cited as the source of the information.
4. Subsets of the records from the database downloaded for use with data from
other data sets must be clearly identified by the attribution “AMNH.”
5. Data are provided to individual users with the understanding that said data will
not be passed on to third parties or redistributed, except with approval from
AMNH.
6. …

117. You are going digital whether you
like it or not…

118. If it is on the web it will be found,
and used

119. This is a good thing

120. Creative Commons

121. Why be open?
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

122. Caeciliidae

123. Caeciliidae

124. Caeciliidae

125. Pagelluserythrinus

126. Pagelluserythrinus

127. Pagelluserythrinus

128. Mannophrynetrinitatis
MVZ 199838
MVZ 199828
(Aneidesflavipunctatus)

129. Errors in databases

130. Errors in publications

131. The Carmen Electra argument for
Open Access

132. treemap

133. reuse data

134. Electra pilosa

135. Carmen Electra versus Electra
(guess who wins…)

136. reuse data

137. Homo sapiens

138. AJ711044

139. should be AJ971044

140. How do we find and fix these
errors?

141. Don’t release data until it is
“perfect”
(wrong)

142. “given enough eyes, all bugs are
shallow”
Eric S Raymond

143. Credit
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

144. Google Page Rank
1.49
A
0.78
B
C
1.58
0.15 D

145. Page rank for web page

146. Scientific citation

147. H-index for authors

148. Impact factor for journals

149. What about an
impact factor for data?

151. Metric of the value of the data

152. Incentive to have globally
unique, citable identifiers

153. What to digitise first?
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/

154. First digitise that which has been
cited

155. W D Lang Nature 139, 191 (1937)
doi:10.1038/139191a0

156. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtl_shag/1403957285/

157. www.nhm.ac.uk

158. V S Smith

159. …end
Photo by Keith Marshall http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmarshall/432924465/