“Pagurus” - Pagurus Fabricius, 1775 from the Malacology and Invertebrate Zoology collected in the United States of America by Florida Museum of Natural History Invertebrate Zoology (licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

How to

How to navigate the Global Registry of Scientific Collections and update its content

How to add a collection or an institution to GRSciColl

You can suggest or add a collection or an institution to GRSciColl here:

Add New Institution

Add New Collection

When creating a new entry in GRSciColl, very few fields are mandatory. However, we really appreciate if you could provide the address for the entry you created (especially the country).

See also this short video tutorial:

If you can’t access Vimeo in your country, here is the YouTube video

How to edit a GRSciColl collection or institution

There are three ways to update information on GRSciColl:

  • you can suggest a change
  • you can become an editor
  • you can import data

See also this short video tutorial:

If you can’t access Vimeo in your country, here is the YouTube video

Suggest a change

Anyone can suggest changes by clicking on any GRSciColl entry, then:

  • Click on Edit
  • Click on the Suggest toggle button
  • Make your suggestion and leave your email address and a comment

You can also suggest adding new entries, merging duplicates and transforming institution entries into collections.

The suggestion will be reviewed by institutional editors, country editors or GBIF Staff depending on the entry edited.

Become editor

There are two types of editors in GRSciColl: editors and mediators. Both can edit data on GRSciColl and review changes but only mediators can delete, merge and transform entries. An editor (or mediator) can be given the permissions to edit:

  • one or several collections
  • one or several institutions (and their associated collections)
  • one or several countries (and their associated institutions and collections)

To become a GRSciColl editor, you will need to have a GBIF user account associated with your institutional email address. Please send us an email at scientific-collections@gbif.org to notify us that you would like to become an editor.

Import data

The GBIF Collections API allows for editing without going through the web interface. The API also has an experimental feature to upload batches of collection and institutions. See the documentation here.

If you are interested in using the API for editing GRSciColl, the permission system and requirements are the same as for becoming an editor.

How to share collection descriptors

We are working on improving the documentation. In the meantime, please refer to this tutorial here: https://data-blog.gbif.org/post/grscicoll-collection-descriptors/