University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![Gbif](http://lh4.ggpht.com/-xUNNB8qt0bo/T0zlTrh5XaI/AAAAAAAABKo/gkNPg4kwKXU/gbif.gif?imgmax=800 "gbif.gif"){border="0"
width="128" height="124" style="float:right;"}Brief update on
[yesterday\'s
post](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/02/linking-gbif-and-biodiversity-heritage.html)
about finding specimens in [BioStor](http://biostor.org). BioStor has
some 66,000 articles from BHL, from which I\'ve extracted 143,000 cases
of a specimen code being cited in the text. Of these 143,000
occurrences, 81,000 have been matched to an occurrence in GBIF.  
  
The top ten collections with specimens in BioStor are:  
  

| Dataset                                                                                           | Number of specimens |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|---------------------|
| NMNH Vertebrate Zoology Herpetology Collections (National Museum of Natural History)              | 11194               |
| Herpetology Collection (University of Kansas Biodiversity Research Center)                        | 9619                |
| Herpetology Collection (University of Kansas Biodiversity Research Center)                        | 9328                |
| NMNH Invertebrate Zoology Collections (National Museum of Natural History)                        | 9061                |
| CAS Herpetology Collection Catalog (California Academy of Sciences)                               | 6720                |
| MCZ Herpetology Collection (Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University)                    | 5818                |
| NMNH Vertebrate Zoology Fishes Collections (National Museum of Natural History)                   | 4642                |
| MCZ Herpetology Collection - Reptile Database (Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University) | 4380                |
| FMNH Herpetology Collections (Field Museum)                                                       | 2110                |
| FMNH Fishes Collections (Field Museum)                                                            | 2061                |

  
  
This is pretty much what I expected. Virtually complete runs of
publications from The Field Museum at Chicago, the University of Kansas,
and the Biological Society of Washington are available in BHL, and many
of these have been added to BioStor. These journals have extensive
taxonomic treatments of vertebrate taxa, particularly frogs, hence
herpetology collections dominate the rankings.  
  
There will inevitably be errors in the mapping between specimen codes
and GBIF occurrences. I\'ve tried to minimise these by mapping codes
within taxonomic groups, but it\'s clear that there are duplicate codes
even within some collections. There is also all manner of variation in
the way people cite museum specimens, and these are often different from
the codes that appear in GBIF. There will also be issues with extracting
specimen codes, and I\'m also discovering a few \*cough\* duplicates of
articles in BioStor, so the numbers I present above are liable to change
as I clean things up.  
  
But one could imagine a \"league table\" of museum collections, where we
can measure both the extent to which those collections have been
digitised, and the extent to which material from those collections have
been cited. We could use this to compute measures of the impact of a
collection.  
  
But for now I\'m browsing the results trying to get a sense of how
successful the mapping has been. There are some interesting examples.
The specimen codes extracted from the article [Review Of The Chewing
Louse Genus Abrocomophaga (Phthiraptera : Amblycera), With Description
Of Two New Species](http://biostor.org/reference/81065) are those for
the mammalian hosts of the lice. Hence someone viewing the records for
these specimens and following the link to this paper would discover that
these mammals had parasitic lice. If we add other sorts of links to the
mix, such as between specimens and DNA sequences, then we can start to
build a rich network of connections between the basic data of
biodiversity.  
  
  


Brief update on yesterday's post about finding specimens in BioStor. BioStor has some 66,000 articles from BHL, from which I've extracted 143,000 cases of a specimen code being cited in the text. Of these 143,000 occurrences, 81,000 have been matched to an occurrence in GBIF.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

GBIF specimens in BioStor: who are the top ten museums with citable specimens?