Just arrived home from Helsinki and it will take a few days to review notes, pictures, thoughts… everything. I’m still overwhelmed by the various impressions from the conference, the speeches, the presentations, the high professionality and friendliness of our hosts from the Nordic Registrars Group, the talks with colleagues, the laughter and the fun and especially from the politeliness and discreet warmth of the Helsinki people. But at least I want to make the presentation I did at the end of the conference available to all of our readers. More reports coming up.

The Next Generation: Breaking Barriers with the Project Registrar Trek

Hyvää päivää. Mitä kuuluu?
Mina olen saksalainen.

Unfortunately, these are the only words I can speak in Suomi, one of the languages in this wonderful country that I had the pleasure to be a guest in for the last few days.
Not more than “Hello, how are you, I’m German.” There is a barrier, a language barrier. Today, I’m speaking about breaking down barriers. Language barriers and other barriers.

Maybe as we sit here together we think that language barriers can be overcome by learning another language. This way we are able to communicate and exchange thoughts, for example in English. While it is true that English enables us to hold conferences like this one, we should keep in mind that we all have just crossed a barrier that leaves other colleagues behind. Who attends this conference? Registrars and collection managers who feel able to follow a conference that is held in English. Others who are not so confident about their language skills stayed at home.

The language barrier might be a problem in understanding each other. But on another level we understand each other very well: we share the language of collections people.

If we talk about lending and borrowing, about storage needs and documentation problems we understand each other, no matter what our mother tongue is and which continent we are from. We understand each other so well that it doesn’t come to mind how difficult it is for other people to understand what we do. This is a barrier not only between us and the visitors in our museums; this is even a barrier between other museum professionals and we, the collections people.

There’s a third barrier. A barrier that is so close to us that we need others to let us see it: it’s the barrier of our everyday work experience, the barrier of our own museum’s walls.
Today, I’m going to introduce a project we started a while ago to work towards breaking these barriers. Some of you might know it already: It’s called Registrar Trek: The Next Generation.

I think there’s no use in clicking through a website and telling you what you see at a conference. That can be better done at home. I think it’s better to tell you something about the general idea of this project, about the spirit of Registrar Trek:

Let us now start to approach the three barriers, starting with the language barrier.

Breaking down the language barrier

The language barrier was the barrier that originally started this project.
We started with three languages: English, Spanish and German. Sure, our translations weren’t always perfect, but it was a start. As soon as we started,

others joined us and right now we have 30 translators from 19 countries providing 16 different languages.

Of course, we don’t have all the posts in all languages right from the start. We are volunteers, mainly working in museums, some studying, some interning, some retired, others job-hunting. So, you can imagine that we are all busy. But because we are many, most of the time we can provide at least 2-3 languages when publishing a new post. Others are added as soon as they arrive.

The good news is that you can’t have too many translators. The more translators we have, the easier it is to balance the workload and the faster we are in adding translations.
So if some of you want to join, I will be glad to say: welcome on board.

Let’s approach the second barrier: The barrier of registrar’s lingo.

Breaking down the barrier of registrar’s lingo: Telling what we really do

We all know what we do every day. When we talk to each other we don’t have to explain many things. We know what a loan contract is and what a disaster plan looks like, we understand categorizing issues, we feel for a colleague that has to upgrade to a new version of a data base, the list goes on and on.

When we talk to “strangers” about our profession we often realize that it’s extremely hard to explain in a few words what the job of a registrar or collections manager consists of.
The question is: why is it that way? We have such a wonderful, thrilling job, why is it so hard to get the message across? So hard, sometimes even our family members have no idea except that we “work at a museum”?

Personally, I think a big part of the challenge is that we try to explain our jobs in an abstract way.

Let me give you an example: I sit together with colleagues at lunch. The educator tells how he guided a difficult class, the press officer tells how she organized a great speaker for the next event and I say that “I did some integrated pest management”.

While I understand what the educator and the press officer did, they don’t understand what I did.
Why didn’t I break this barrier by saying that I had checked and baited mouse traps the whole morning? Well, that’s not exactly slaying dragons, but in the museum perspective, it’s pretty close.
That’s exactly the approach of Registrar Trek to break this barrier: by telling stories.

I know that „storytelling“ has become a buzzword in the museum field, but the truth is: telling stories is a very ancient way of getting messages across in an entertaining way.

A story about what one has to consider when storing earphones or how one built a box for hundreds of buttons gives a better impression of our job to an outsider than collection policies and job descriptions.

A story about how you climbed the roof of your storage area five times to supervise the craftsmen working there will give a better hands-on impression of the job duties than any handbook.

It will help students and young emerging museum professionals decide if collections is really the perfect fit for them or if it might be better to pursue the marketing or education path.

A story about how you found information about an object that proves its significance for the collection and your community will give other museum professionals like educators and press officers food for their own work and an idea why the work you do is important for the museum.

But telling stories can also help us to approach the third barrier: the barrier of your own museum’s walls.

Breaking down the barrier of the own museum’s walls

When you work for a specific museum a long time you become blind to its shortcomings and, more often, you don’t see what works well any more. I brought you a picture:

I don’t know how many of you have had this kind of situation. When you are heading for a museum career you absorb everything about best practices, about good storage conditions, about wearing white gloves. Then you take up a job and start with all the enthusiasm of the young, aspiring museum professional. And then, the real museum world hits you.

In short: you have all the knowledge and the guidelines how it should be but literally no one has prepared you for the situation as it will be.

The trouble is that reading guidelines and official publications of museum associations in such a situation isn’t helpful. Instead it’s depressing. But what might be helpful or at least encouraging is to read stories about how someone brought order to such a mess – or how it could be worse. And if you cleaned out this mess it can feel fabulous to write an article for Registrar Trek about it.

I think our author Anne T. Lane said it best when she said:

“Our triumphs are not like other people’s triumphs. Our crises are not like other people’s crises. It’s good to find ourselves part of a community that understands.”

And maybe, when you publish it, you will suddenly get feedback from colleagues from around the world helping you to see your own situation from a different angle.
When you and I look at the picture the immediate thought is: “What a mess! We have to start cleaning and wrapping those objects, someone go, fetch some archival boxes”
But in a small rural museum in Germany, your colleague (who most certainly will also hold the title of director, visitor guide, administration officer, janitor and webmaster) will say: “Oh, lucky you! You have a room for storage, the roof isn’t leaking and it seems all those objects have labels!”

So, the benefit of writing stories and articles for Registrar Trek is not only to help and encourage others, it can also be a chance of reflecting on our own position. And you create a chance for professional discussion.

Best practices are in constant development and improvement and need creative input that comes out of our everyday, hands-on working practice.

Breaking barriers needs many heads and hands

Right from the start Registrar Trek was meant to be a project designed to involve many people from our profession. It was never about one or two people telling their stories and the others just translating and commenting. (Otherwise I would constantly bore you with stories out of collection management in a German Science and Technology Museum).

We wanted to have collection professionals from around the world bringing in their views, their articles, and their stories. For example, Tracey Berg-Fulton who did the wonderful session before this one wrote an article about how she became a registrar, and that’s just one out of many.

We want you to bring in your views, your articles, and your stories.

The core of Registrar Trek is that it is a common project of colleagues. Standing here alone and telling you about Registrar Trek feels somehow wrong. So, to speak for the authors of Registrar Trek I’m very glad to have Derek Swallow here from the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.

Derek Swallow enters the stage and says the following part:

Thank you Angela.

I want to very briefly touch on two points: how you can contribute if you choose and secondly the rewards of being a Registrar Trek author.

Currently we have four main sections in Registrars Trek any of which you can contribute to: the first is Articles which covers broader issues of common interest and a share point for ideas; next is Stories – this section is comprised of real shared events celebrating learning by way of our successes and failures; the third is called the Registrars Tool Box containing practical solutions, and facts to assist with our day-to-day work; and finally Registrar Humour – I find I need a daily dose of humour to keep me sane in this wonderful but stressful job.

Now the rewards of being a Registrar Trek author: personally, it’s about the process of engaging in communication about museum topics with collections specialists from all over the world. For example, in past articles I’ve presented a new approach to conducting collections committee meetings adopted recently at my museum. I’ve also posed the question: how does authenticity relate to collecting in the 21 century museum? I’ve discussed how our roles as registrars are perceived or misperceived by both the general public and other museum employees.

As a result of writing these articles I’ve received important feedback which has helped evolve and clarify my ideas as a professional in this field as well as establish professional connections with colleagues in Europe, North America and Africa.

I want to leave you with one final thought. In this room 34 nations are represented. If even one person from each nation were to join Registrar Trek as a writer or contributor what an amazing network of communication would open up for us all and can you imagine how broad and rich our exchange of ideas would be?

I thank you all.

Thank you so much, Derek.

I believe we’ve said all we wanted to say about our project. Don’t forget we are always glad to publish your stories. Maybe you haven’t killed a dragon. But maybe you found a great new way of reorganizing your storage space. Or to pack an X-Ray-tube. Or you accidentally loaned 200 artifacts and want to tell others how to avoid this.

Keep up the good work, thanks for listening and may the road rise to meet you.

Kiitos paljon, Helsinki!

This post is also available in Italian, translated by Marzia Loddo.

It’s dangerous to be on twitter. Recently, Tanja Praske from KULTUR-MUSEO-TALK threw a blog stick at me. I had to look it up first but now I take it with white gloves and answer her questions:

Who are you? What excites you about your job?

I’m many. No, I’m not schizophrenic, but Registrar Trek is a joint project with four permanent authors, many guest authors and at the moment 36 translators. The range goes from the Canadian collection manager to the Russian marketing expert who lives in Bulgaria to the press officer in Simbabwe. I take the liberty to answer your questions as Angela Kipp, co-founder and administrator of the project.

I’m the collection manager of the TECHNOSEUM in Mannheim/Germany. It might sound trite, but what excites me most about my job is the diversity of tasks. One day you organize the shipping of a huge, fragile machine, the next you wonder how to store 400 little magnetic traffic signs that once belonged to a driving school. Our collection contains about 170,000 artifacts and to safeguard that nothing gets damaged and everything is stored properly, efficient and retrievable is a Sisyphean task, to put it in a positive way: a life’s work.

Registrar Trek is a private project where I act out my passion for writing and new media. As a positive professional side effect it helps socializing with colleagues who work in collections management or related fields around the world.

How long have you been planning for your current exhibition/project? What was the biggest challenge and how did you solve the issue?

Oh, that’s not an easy one to answer. We who are working in the museum storage are the logistical backbone for a great deal of activities in a museum, that’s why many tasks and projects run parallel. Recently, we opened the exhibition “The Collection 2: The Electrical Household”. Despite the general opinion this doesn’t mean that the work on the exhibition is done. Now we are clearing the way for the artifacts to come back, which means reorganizing spaces so when we take down the exhibition the artifacts can come to their storage places quick and the whole process runs smoothly. The faster we manage the dismantling of this exhibition, the more buffer time we create for the installation of the next exhibition “Herzblut” (“heart blood”, in Germany a term also used for commitment) about medical history.

Both exhibitions use mainly artifacts from our own collection, this means also that both exhibition teams have/had to work parallel in the storage area. Logically, no object should be confused with another or – worse – disappear. Much more artifacts are sighted than are used in the final exhibition. All database entries must be checked and corrected if necessary, most of the time they also need a picture.

Many objects need to be treated by conservators before they can be photographed which means one more transport. One can roughly imagine how many object moves there are if you know that there are 1750 artifacts exhibited in “Collection 2” and there will be at least 200 artifacts published in the exhibition catalog for “Heart Blood” alone, not to mention the whole exhibition… Needless to say that there is our normal everyday work of acquisitions and loaning to other museums.

The main challenge is to keep track of everything in this gigantic game of Tetris. If work flow and documentation is organized smoothly, a burst pipe on the special exhibition area like we had it this time can be treated relaxed as a minor incident.

What is the smallest artifact in your collection?

It’s probably a grammophone needle. They are only about one centimeter long and very thin. The respective containers are already so small that I can balance eight of them in the palm of my hand (not that I recommend this from an arthandling point of view!).

Is there an odd story/experience concerning and artifact/exhibition? Tell us about it. It can be an strange object, too.

Oh, there are tons of stories… Talking about “creative packaging”: There was a donation to our museum, the artifact doesn’t matter here. It was in a box and when we opened it, the first thing we saw were trash bags, the ones you get for free in Mannheim to collect plastics for recycling. Anyway, those bags were filled with cut out caps from milk bags. Probably they should form a flexible cushion. The artifact itself was wrapped in a bath mat. The kind that are cut out like an U to put them in front of the toilet. Obviously, this mat was historical too, and hadn’t seen a washing machine before changing its intended use…

Do you have a favorite artifact? Why?

Asking a grandmother for her favorite grandchild… Maybe the K2 manufactured by AEG, the oldest surviving magnetic tape recorder. Its ancestors K1 were destroyed when an exhibition hall burned down at the international radio show in Berlin 1935. As far as our research goes there is only one copy of the successor K2 left – the one in our collection. While it’s quite natural for a collection of paintings to have unique artifacts it’s something very special for a collection of artifacts that were manufactured in great numbers.

Which artifact was the last one treated by a conservator and why?

Currently there are many artifacts treated for “Heart Blood”. Cleaning measures included we speak about hundreds of artifacts that are treated by our team of conservators. I remember especially the “Blaue Heinrich” (might be known as “Blue Henri” or “Blue Peter” in English speaking countries), a blue bottle used as a spittoon for people suffering tuberculosis. This might sound familiar to all of you who read “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. For we weren’t sure if there was still infectious material inside it had to be sanitized by a conservator. Guess that’s one of the things you don’t really think about when deciding to study conservation…

What’s the significance of your blog for your museum?

We are not a blog of the TECHNOSEUM, they have their own blog at http://www.technoseum-blog.de (worth a look!), that’s why Registrar Trek has no “official” significance. But of course my work inspired one article or the other, we have some faithful readers among our staff and the international network is helpful in many aspects of everyday work.

Do you have a favorite blogpost? If so, why?

Again asking a grandmother for her favorite grandchild… maybe “The Museum Registrar as Loans…” by Derek Swallow where he names the different professions a registrar has to be while he is involved with a loan – from juggler to legal associate. It’s a great article over all but I especially like the pictures he chose from the archives.

What does culture mean to you?

Culture is very important to me. But I’m not thinking about museums, theaters, opera, the so called “high culture”, in the first place, but culture in a more general meaning of the word, the everyday culture, how we interact as human beings. I find it thrilling to learn about different cultures. You don’t have to go abroad or look at people with migration background. It’s totally sufficient to look at our own surroundings. How much a culture exemplified by television is copied in everyday life. How it influences the language, the clothes, the wishes, for example. I think it’s very rewarding to observe this and to question it. For example many colleagues and friends from North America are surprised when I tell them what we think is “typical American”. The caricature transported by American TV series is not very far from the German as Nazi with leather trousers. To find parallels and differences in other cultures and think about the own culture – or maybe better: cultures – is very exciting.

If you “have an affair” with other cultural venues, what do you do?
I go to other museums and look what I would have done differently. Not fair, but fun. Apart from that I’m so surrounded by culture at my work that I prefer nature in my private life.

You got three wishes, what do you wish for?
1. Health for me and my family, I don’t know how you count, maybe all three are gone now but if not so…
2. Financial security for the rest of my life
3. The third wish I give to anyone desperately needing a wish

Phew, I’ve done it!

Now whom to throw the stick? Most outstanding blogs I can think of already got the #BestBlog Award. But I found one that is definitely worth it: the German/Russian/English Blog “Museum, Politics and Power” http://museumspoliticsandpower.org/ Duck and cover, Katrin, Linda and the others I haven’t known until now, here are your questions:

1. How did you come up with the idea of this blog?
2. How is the collaboration organized despite of the language barriers?
3. What projects are you working on?
4. Which blog entry stirred your emotions?
5. Which blog entry had the most outreach?
6. Which museum blogs do you like especially?
7. Which exhibition you found outstanding recently?
8. Which recent museum trends are interesting?
9. If you could found a museum as team of “Museum, Politics & Power” and you had all the money in the world …what would be the topic?
10. …which three artifacts definitely belong in the exhibition?
11. …where would it be?

And now?

As far as I understood the game:

– Answer the eleven questions. You may bend them to your convenience.
– Put the BestBlog picture in there and link to the blog that awarded you or link to the article of the one who threw the stick.
– Create eleven new questions and ask them ten other bloggers (it can be less than ten).

Would be great to post a comment with the link as soon as you answered my questions.

Have a great week, all!
Angela

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to do the same exhibition again? Do the opportunities for avoiding mistakes make it different or better? Well, that’s kind of the situation we ran into recently.

How it all began

In 2010 the museum building needed to take clearing-up measures that ate up much of the budget. But, of course, our visitors still wanted to see something. No money, no staff, no time – was there a solution? Yes, there was. We still had our own collections! Minimum transportation costs, no courier fees, no insurance problems. If we used only storage racks as showcases and archival materials for presentation we didn’t need much exhibition design and could re-use the materials afterwards. The more we thought about it, the more we fell for the idea. As an extra, we could check a large amount of our collection, correct data base entries, maybe retrieve some of the “location unknown“ artifacts and resolve some “found in collections.” To make a long story short, in 2011 we opened “Die Sammlung: 1001 Objekt zum Hören und Sehen“ (The Collection: 1001 Artifacts to Listen To and Look At), a presentation of our collections of radios, TV sets, record players, film projectors, cameras, tape recorders, video recorders… Our visitors loved it!

So, as you can imagine, when it became clear we would repeat the exhibition using our collection of household appliances, we were all excited. And while team spirit during the preparation of the first collection’s exhibition was like manning an expedition ship and sailing into the Great Unknown, this time it was like a soccer match against our former selves: we wanted to make it bigger, better and more colorful than the first time.

Spirit of improvement: Right or left – my position

We knew what worked well last time and so we had a map to follow. But instead of following it slavishly in the spirit of “we always did it that way,“ we followed it in the spirit of improvement.

For example, the first time we had tested all layouts of the artifacts on the shelves beforehand. We had a rack similar to those in the exhibition set up in the storage area, so we could arrange the artifacts until they looked best. Investing in the time to do this during preparation reduces stress during the final installation process. In addition, it’s not important who does the final installation. The positions on the racks are clear, so anybody with experience in artifact handling can do it without taking time thinking about the perfect layout.

After the artifacts were arranged we gave them position numbers on the shelf. The first time we went with directions, so our packing lists looked like this:

Inventory number, object name, rack number, shelf number, left

While this had worked pretty well, we made some observations:

• Positioning with terms like left and right might seem clear on paper, but if you have team members who sometimes confuse left and right (like myself), mistakes in positioning are likely to happen.
• Left, middle and right work well if you only have three radios on the shelf. You can work with more artifacts by inventing terms like “outer left“ and “middle left.” This sounds charming, but impractical.

So we switched to using position numbers from 1 on up, numbering from left to right. Now our packing lists looked like this:

Inventory number, object name, rack number, shelf number, Pos. (for position number) 3

For the same reason we decided to take an additional step in preparation. The first time we had noted the positions on the shelf only in our data base. This time we took a picture of every shelf layout and wrote the position numbers on it. We attached the picture to every packing list. Now, whoever was positioning the artifacts during installation could use the picture as a reference.

This was only one example of the many things we improved during preparation.

A second loop of improvement

We all worked in “improvement mode“ during preparation and continued that way during installation. We ran into several things we could do better next time.

For example, after we attached the exhibit labels, we took down the inventory cards and collected them. The first time we had collected them all in a box and sorted them by inventory number so that they could be found pretty quickly once one had the inventory number.
Suddenly our student assistant said, “Wait a minute, wouldn’t it be better to collect and store them by rack and shelf number?“

We briefly discussed the idea, approved it, and in his honor named it “The Pakenis Maneuver.” From this moment on we collected the inventory cards in zip-lock bags, one for each shelf, with the rack number and shelf number written on them. When we take down the exhibition everybody can grab the bags of the rack she or he has to pack up and is equipped with the appropriate inventory cards.

Another example is the layout pictures. I described how we prepared them and it sounded pretty good to you, didn’t it? Yep, thought so. We were pretty proud of the idea. However, during preparation we realized that it was a good idea, but not the best.

We had a picture attached to every packing list, which wasn’t necessary. Most of the time we simply took the picture from the first box, put it on the shelf and used this picture as a reference. So, in the future we can skip the effort of printing out the picture and attaching it to the packing list. We will print all the pictures immediately before preparation and place them on the corresponding shelves. This will save some paper and ink, too.

Having the position numbers written on the pictures was of help but you had to skip between the picture and the packing list, because you had the inventory number on the artifact and the packing list, but not on the picture. This also led to confusion with similar-looking artifacts on the same shelf. Next time we will also write the inventory numbers on the picture.

The art of making mistakes

One thing we realized during preparation and installation was that we ran into mistakes we had already made the first time. Not wanting to admit mistakes is human. Making the same mistake twice is dumb. The main mistake we made last time was not making notes of what didn’t work. So we only improved the things we remembered, while we were forced to repeat the mistakes we forgot.

Being in “improvement mode“ we decided to do it better this time. Every time we realized something that could have been improved upon, someone said, “Stop. Make a note!“ And we did. It didn’t matter if we were standing on ladders, cleaning acrylic glass or attaching labels; someone always took a quick note of what we had realized.

Shortly after the exhibit opening we sat down, collected all our notes and discussed other things we remembered. We will collect them all in one paper, including the things that worked well and that we will definitely do again. This might serve as a reference for upcoming collections exhibitions and even if many of our suggestions are very specific, some might be helpful for other projects, too.

Our Score

On February 19 we opened “The Collection 2: The Electrical Household.”

If you have 3D glasses (red-cyan) you can follow our 3D virtual tour. If you haven’t, you may visit our picture gallery.

You may take a look at those two videos from German TV:

http://www.rnf.de/mediathek/kategorie/themenserien/technoseum-mannheim/#.UwoZBYUnYyM

http://www.swr.de/swr4/bw/nachrichten/rhein-neckar/technoseum-in-mannheim-ausstellung-der-ungewoehnlichen-haushaltsgeraete/-/id=258328/did=12909124/nid=258328/m1pgqm/index.html

I said we were like a soccer team playing against our former selves. So, what was the score?

• We showed more artifacts than the first time (1750 against 1639, but the first figure included about 300 archival items, while this exhibition was composed almost entirely of artifacts).
• We had a closer collaboration with our marketing department, resulting in more blog entries, a Christmas tree decorated with household appliances and a Tweetup (#Sammlung2).
• We looked into a greater number of artifact groups and therefore were able to set more data base entries straight.
• Both times, we were done with the basic installation a few days before opening, allowing us to improve some more things immediately.
• Let’s see if we can improve on the number of visitors to the first exhibition, which was 14,400 higher than expected.

But there’s no reason to stop here. When it comes to doing things better, there is no finish line. Next time our rallying cry will be again:

Go, get us!

P.S. During preparation we learned many things (such as: why check shelves before screwing acrylic glass to the front) so there is material for a few more stories on Registrar Trek. Stay tuned!

Like always brought from German English into correct English by Molly Hope.

Working with databases is one of the core responsibilities of a registrar. Often enough, one becomes upset with insufficiencies of the used system. You can imagine my excitement when I learned about the project of Michael Hesemann. He took the effort to develop a web database for his own field of interest, the foraminifera. Voluntarily, only out of enthusiasm for his field and collection. It provides quick access to all relevant information for scientists and collectors around the world. Now, even well-known institutions like the Smithonian and the Geological Survey Austria provide information about their collections of forams there. Read more about the development of this project.
Cheers!
Angela

written by Michael Hesemann, Foraminifera.eu Project, Hamburg

Project Development

In December 2007, I became interested in Foraminifera (aka forams)—not widely known single-cell organisms that have been building delicate internal shells for 540 million years. I was surprised to learn that up to 1/3 of the composition of the cliffs of Dover, Egyptian pyramids, and other examples of stone can be forams. Perhaps just as surprising is the fact that all living forams make up 1% of the earth’s biomass and are therefore more substantial than all mammals.

This is likely the first time you’re hearing about this, which suggests that basic information does not come to light without detailed study, review of the literature, and intense research. Fortunately, I met two foram enthusiasts in Hamburg, who, like Ernst Häkel was back in 1900, had long been interested in the beauty of forams and their rich variety of forms. We decided to photograph our collections and post them on the internet at www.foraminifera.eu.

Getting our images online, arduously taken through a microscope, went really well at first. But within a few weeks, Fabrizio contacted us, an Italian scientist offering to contribute 100 SEM (scanning electron microscope) images. Suddenly there were 250 images, which meant we had to sort them somehow and make them easily accessible. We realized we would need to develop a concept that could also accommodate 2500 images.

Or Own Database Concept Was Inevitable!

The concept of databases used by large museums, scientific institutions, and online databases like EOL or WoRMS turned out to be uni-dimensionally tailored to taxonomy and numbering. Don’t foraminifera have more information to offer? And what did we want from the collection as users? Considerable inconsistencies among datasets, a lack of illustrations, and clumsy interfaces seemed less than satisfactory.

Our Multidimensional Database Concept with Consistent Categories

Our philosophy is that a collection should make its objects easily accessible to everyone, from the absolute layman to the most highly specialized scientist. Every kind of object—in our case, foram shells—carries with it a variety of information. In a database, we’re limited to categories of information that apply to nearly any other object or can be researched with a reasonable amount of effort. For analysis, a high level of data consistency is essential.

With forams, consistent categories are taxonomy, morphology, locality, era (geologic), reference citations, dataset relevance, and collector information. Whether the habitat (ecological niche) can be consistently provided is debatable.

User-oriented Access

The user should be able to easily and reliably retrieve all available information by means of an easy-to-use interface. This necessitates the following:

• Each object must be represented by realistic illustrations (drawings, photos, 3D objects), and each of the defined fields must be populated (metadata)
• The interface must allow the user to conduct searches in every field
• The user must receive a list of search results that includes thumbnail images and essential information from which the user can drill down to more detailed information, including references

Technical and Financial Resources

Because this is not a commercial project, there are no financial resources. Contributions result from enthusiasm for the topic. All contributors cover the cost of their own contributions. All contributors are individually named and receive their own websites and the opportunity for evaluation of their contributions.

Regarding technical issues, only the most simple programs and systems are used: Excel, PHP, SQL, HTML, and a grassroots website hosted by a mass-provider.

A comprehensive collection of literature on forams, journal subscriptions, and good contacts with relevant scientists is available. Collection of sediments and forams are conducted, and detailed how-to’s and tools on processing samples are also available. No-cost access to a scanning electron microscope (SEM) is also available.

Milestones

Not necessarily planned this way, but looking back, this is how it happened:

2008
Development and promotion of the website; receipt of samples from amateur fossil collectors

2009
Further temporal and geographic coverage through 1200 images; creation of a support community of amateurs and junior scientists

2010
Introduction of the project to 400 scientists at the FORAMS2010 conference in Bonn; support from scientists; aid offered to amateurs and young scientists, particularly those in less-developed countries

2011
Expansion of database criteria to 20; conversion from pure HTML to PHP-SQL; support from senior scientists secured; presentations at international conferences; expansion to 4000 images

2012
Top ranking by Google (SEO; expansion of database criteria to 30; networking; receipt of image rights from publishers and institutions; expansion to 5500 images

2013
Permission to use c. 30,000 foram images (including those of numerous type specimens) from the Smithsonian Institute, the Austrian Federal Geological Agency, and the Brzybowski Foundation; permission from senior scientists to use their life’s works; expansion of the image database to 7700 images; cultivation of the support community; collaboration with WoRMS

2014
Project presentation at the FORAMS2014 conference in Chile; continued collaboration with WoRMS; image rights secured for remaining images; expansion of database to 10,000 images; cultivation of the support community

*)
EOL = Encyclopedia of Life, www.eol.org
WoRMS = World Register of Marine Species, www.marinespecies.org

Translated from German into English by Cindy Opitz.

This article is also available in Italian, translated by Marzia Loddo.