Dear Björn,

 

We do have numerous specimens bought from Krantz back in the 19^th century and early 20^th century (btw. 1844 and 1913), as well as some purchased in the 70ties.

 

A quick search in the collections database (which unfortunately covers only a portion of the collection) revealed that there is material from 95 different localities among the material bought from Krantz (I have not spent any effort on cleaning up spelling variants for this query, so there may be a few less in reality).

 

Reg. Steffen’s question on how public we want the locality data: I can sympathize with your concern, in this particular case, however, it is a non-issue in my opinion, since the locality data attached to the Krantz specimens is not very detailed and hardly something that could be easily exploited for finding localities for commercial exploitation – it would be far more efficient for collectors/dealers to consult the scientific literature to gain such information.

 

I would be willing to join your effort reg. the VA call and think there would be mutual benefit in clarifying Krantz specimen locality data.

 

Can you clarify what you mean by digitization of the Krantz specimens in this context – just digitizing the specimen data or do you intend to photograph the specimens too?

 

 

 

Hello everyone,

 

I just had a conversation with Jiri Frank about the current VA Synthesys call and GeoCASe and he recommended me to bring the issue to the ESG group:

 

Here in Helsinki the palaeo-collections consist in large part of historical material acquired from commercial fossil dealers during late 19^th early 20^th century (The majority from Krantz Mineralienkontor). We now have almost all specimens databased and could publish them on GeoCASe. But the problem is the data. Most of the taxonomies are hopelessly outdated and locality information is a wild mix of verbatim and updated. Additionally, such material is often regarded as scientifically problematic and difficult to use, because it is acquired second hand, with poor locality and stratigraphy information and outdated taxonomy. So publishing it on GeoCaASe as it is, is a bit problematic, so to say. I think we are not the only museum with this problem. Especially many smaller museums across Europe probably have large parts of their collections acquired second hand, especially from Krantz.

 

However, material acquired from Krantz etc., often contains specimens by respected scientists (sometimes even entire suites) and it comes from classical localities, which are often inaccessible today. Krantz material, therefore, is a rich source for neotypes and largely unexplored for palaeobiological and palaeoecological analyses. This material also has the curatorial advantage that it comes from a limited number of localities and and that lots of this material is redundant across collections. This offers a chance to avoid redundant curating work in updating the metadata, because there is potentially always somewhere else one collection where the metadata of specimens from one locality, or one taxon are in a good shape.

 

This is the reason why I suggest a VA project with the aim just to digitize just the Krantz material from different museums, make it explicitly visible at GeoCASe, and with it, provide a tool to harmonize the verbatim names (taxon, locality, etc.). In parallel I consider to submit an application (here in Finland) to support a zooniverse citizen science project and/or automated solution to find verbatim name matches across collections, based on GeoCASe records.

 

Now I have a few questions:

Do you think this worth the effort? Is my impression right, that there would be many new use-cases if e.g., Krantz      material is explicitely accessible at GeoCASe?

Would anyone of the ESG group specifically interested in a direct cooperation for such a VA project and an application elsewhere?

 

I am happy about feedback,

 

Best wishes,

Björn

 

To unsubscribe from this list please go to http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=VW94oI025f8qRGA3goytUzQisJ4aIjU0