What will happen to uur notebooks? (1 Viewer)

Tony & I were talking about birding notebooks & we both wondered what will happen to our notebooks when we go to "The Better place?"
As an ardent recorder of anything Natural History wise I keep nature diaries, record sheets of all my Mammals & other fauna, card indexes of Fungi & plants & submit all records to the county recorders.

I would not like anyone to throw out all my records & notebooks & diaries when i'm gone & Tony & i though that someone should have a place where Nature Diaries etc are kept.

I hope my County Museum will have all my stuff when I die.

What do others think should happen to their notes.

CJ

Well as you may realise by now I am not overly as serious as you about my notes.. I believe you to be right about yours though and I hope they are kept by your local museum.. that would be thoughtful of them.. actually insightfull really.
Me.. I am leaving mine to my grandson.. as so far he is the only family member to show any interest in this natural world .. and should there be another then they too will be the recipient of my wanderings and all the money we have spent compiling these interesting if somewhat uncatalogued lists and things.

I always check old reports about birds. They make good reading. Without these recorders sending in records there would be no report. I like to record numbers, sexes & what if anything they are doing ie Golden Plover c300 feeding on Ploughed Field. I always ad grid references (A UK mapping system I assume) so that future Naturalists can locate the sites where things are found. Without grid references records are useless.

In my opinion. If a rare bird was seen at Kessingland Suffolk say that could mean two square miles if the ref said TM502964 I could locate the exact spot it was found.

This information although published also needs to be seen when it was written in situ as definate proof. This can only happen if notebooks are archived somewhere.

cJ

I keep records of birds seen purely for my own reference and to help county recorder however I keep a diary and have been told it is good so I hope some one in my family takes an interest and then I can pass them on. But I am getting a teeny bit carried away as I am only 31 (methinks)! If you think your notes are well written then why not have them sent to a publisher and if they get published then your notes will never become obsolete?

I try to send my reports to the country recorder as I take them, so they must be recorded somewhere - but if our diary's are full of other interesting stuff - not just lists and statistics, but also notes about behavior, habitat, interaction between species, weather notes and sketches there really ought to be a national or even international online resoource - where these notebooks could be sent, scanned in and indexed for the world to browse forever FOR FREE. I am sure it would be of interest to all those keen on the natural world and those with an academic interest too - it would just take someone to start the project off.

Well volunteered that man 8-P

Ash

Observations on Notebooks.

Hello everyone and a happy new year to you all.

Just a few observations of my own, about what to do with notebooks.

The way that we record our observations has changed over the last few years. Originally the personal notebook was the way for most people. In our notebooks we often recorded personal lists and national lists of what birds we observed. There was not a recognised standard formula for recording our observations. Most people would just record the date, time, place and species. There were a few who would also record temperature, cloud cover, wind direction and maybe rain fall. The lack of a “recording standard” has made many of our observations somewhat fragmented. Add to this the varying level of expertise used to identify species and what can be seen is that the “Hard Data” is unreliable.

There was also in the past an ad-hoc way that people would share information and observations. Some kept records for personal pleasure only. Other might share with individuals within a birding group. Others might share with county recorders. Publication of the information was only within the domain of the rich, larger groups or academic researchers. Whilst the country recorder at a bare minimum should be the repository of the information on a year by year basis. Often this work is done by a relatively few but dedicated individual people, in their own free but limited time.

So what has changed?

The advent of the personal computer, compact disk technology, digital photography, the Internet and the World Wide Web has now brought about a significant change in what we can now achieve. There are many Computer programs available usually on compact disk to aid identification of species, containing both pictures and sound. There are specialist programs to create databases where we can record our personal observations. The internet has given us the unique opportunity to contact a very significant percentage of the world population. The WWW has allowed people to publish their information in the form of personal birding based web pages.

So where do we go next?

What is obviously needed now is a number of on line electronic repositories for all our national information. The repositories will need to have a method of data sharing. The data will need to be stored in such a way that aids dynamic publication and aids searching. In other words we need a formula or definition for a “recording standard” that described the actual data format. The generic data representation definition will be used to specify the structure of the information.

Key fields in the “data format” need to be specified. There are the obvious ones. However, the data format should describe each field in detail. Let’s look by way of an example at recording the date. This could be recorded in a number of ways MM/DD/YYYY including “01:Jan:2003” or “01:01:2003” or even “1st:01:2003” Then there is the American convention of MM/DD/YY Jan:1st:03 or even 03:01:03 to be considered. The information needs to be saved out of your recording program into the “recording standard” prior to being uploaded to your national repository.

(Anyone who is familiar with Family History will have used a “GEDCOM” file at some time. GEDCOM allows the exchange of data from many genealogical programs structured in such a way that the data can be imported into or exported from many different family history programs. See http://www.gendex.com/gedcom55/55gcch1.htm for more information.)

I have written a program that uses an MS Access database for recording daily observational information collated by our local group members (Barnsley Birding Society in South Yorkshire) The output is then imported into MS Word and used to produce a yearly birding report for the area centred around the RSPB’s Old Moor wetlands centre in the Dearne Valley. Prior to using the program, the report would take almost a year to produce. Now the local area report can be produced and on sale within a few weeks.

Caveat: Back in the early days of computing in the 70’s & 80’s the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) had a doomsday project. The problem now is that the technology used to store the information is so old that the media cannot be read. Let this be a warning. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2534391.stm

Well that’s it from me.