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This interest group is a collaboration between TDWG and the Research Data Alliance to enhance existing and create new standards for giving attribution for the maintenance, curation, and digitization of physical and digital objects with a special emphasis on biodiversity collections. This group will produce use cases from a variety of disciplines that will be used to create the final deliverable – an attribution metadata schema.
Rationale
Despite the importance of research collections, many are not maintained or curated as thoroughly as they should. Part of the reason for this is the lack of professional reward for curatorial actions. Most of the researchers who are qualified to curate a collection are too busy performing activities that will reap professional reward, such as publication and grant-writing. Proper methods of attribution (at the individual and institutional level) are very important for incentivizing digitization, mobilization. And sharing of data deriving from collections (physical and digital). One strategy for incentivizing physical and digital collection curation is to create infrastructure for attributing curatorial actions. Several programs exist for aggregating metrics for research products other than publication, such as ImpactStory, OpenVIVO, Collector, and Altmetrics. Thus, there is already infrastructure in place for aggregating these data, if the infrastructure for creation of these data is available.
How to contribute
- Watch this GitHub repository: https://github.com/tdwg/attribution
- Submit or comment on an issue on this github project.
- Join the RDA/TDWG Working Group at the RDA website https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/metadata-standards-attribution-physical-and-digital-collections-stewardship.html