Biological Records Centre: Supporting iRecord into the Future

Where will iRecord be in five, ten or more years? The Biological Record Centre (BRC) developed the iRecord and Indicia tools to support the collation, checking and sharing of online biological records. A wide range of national and local recording schemes and centres make use of this system, and it also forms an integral part of BRC’s own data management processes, helping to make data available for research and many other uses. This talk presents some of BRC’s current and planned work on the system, and looks at what other options we should explore in the future.

Q&A with Martin Harvey

Martin Harvey works at the UKCEH Biological Records Centre as part of the team that develops and supports iRecord, and liaises with national monitoring and recording schemes. As a volunteer, he runs the national scheme for soldierflies and allies and is the county moth recorder for Berkshire.

Will the verifier survey results be made public?

We will be providing feedback to the people who took part in the survey and eventually we hope to make it available to all verifiers.

Can you tailor iRecord to a species group, such as changing the different fields which might be relevant?

It’s relatively straight-forward to set up additional recording forms on the website that can be customised, it’s a very flexible system. Making it work with the app is rather more complicated and we are more limited in what we can do with the app.

Having lots of different recording forms can make it more difficult for users, particularly those who record a lot of different species groups. The more different forms that a user has to input data into, the more difficult it can become.

Are there any places to add more species synonyms to iRecord?

The species names in iRecord all come from the UK Species Inventory which is the national database that is maintained at the National History Museum (NHM) and it is pretty comprehensive. Requests can be made to NHM to add synonyms to the dataset. And always try to import records using the scientific name, rather than the English name.