Georeferencing Train-the-Trainers Survey Results Selected Findings

You are a Diverse Group! Undergraduate Graduate student Post-doc Collection manager Collections Assistant Curator Curatorial assistant, technician University faculty Museum scientist Project Manager Georeferencing Technician ITS professional Technology department staff

Range of Georeferencing Experience Zero to thousands of records

Participants’ Experience: What have you georeferenced? Other: Geologic materials, cultural artifacts

Participants’ Projects Databases range from 1 – 100+ Institutions range from 1 to 65 Unique locality records range from 1000 to 1,000,000 Specimen records range from 10,000 to millions Number of people to do georeferencing ranges from 2- 3 to hundreds

Software Used to Georeference

Data Management Software

Topics of Greatest Interest Online tools for georeferencing Semi-automated tools for georeferencing Data cleaning, processing, and analysis Collaborative georeferencing using GEOLocate Localities and locality descriptions Post automation validation Examples of possible workflows using GEOLocate, Symbiota and/or Specify Working with polygons and representing localities as polygons

Participants’ Future Workshops

TTT Cohort 1 13 of 19 respondents have conducted at least one training 11 - one-on-one or small group training 6 - conducted large group trainings More than 13,000 records have been digitized as a result of the training* *need a better way to track this metric!

Resources Used 11 of 13 used resources from the workshop Georeferencing Quick Reference Guide extensively (and have several copies on hand in the lab). I have also utilized the georeferencing calculator, the GBIF georeferencing guide, and almost all of the material covered at the workshop in Gainesville (2012). I have an EverNote folder with all of the notes I took at the workshop, including Powerpoint links, worked examples, discussion topics, links to external resources, and activities that I draw upon on a daily basis. Vimeo Videos Power Point presentations Excel Template Geocalculator Geolocate Geographical Concepts, GeoLocate, georeferencing calculator Yes, I have shared online resources with students and colleagues.

Resources Used I've used the online tools and quick guides to provide a quick overview of the methods/workflows. I usually will send the wiki as a link prior to the training as sort of overview/read ahead. Used the content from the Workshop to write up my own protocol Georeferencing Calculator; Presentations from The First iDigBio GWG Train the Trainers Workshop (if nothing more as a refresher to make sure I am including everything) I reviewed ALL the materials before conducting the training. I modeled the workshop after the session on the georeferencing calculator but made my own materials. Georeferencing Quick Reference Guide, Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing, MaNIS Georeferencing Calculator, Selected Online Resources & Tools, Google Earth Statoids Yes we absolutely used all of the resources on the wiki to plan our training. Some of the slides depicting various georeferencing principles were particularly helpful.

What Worked Well—Small Group Personalized attention Watching the videos – Watching the videos prior to the workshop meant we could save some time going through those topics and also gave them time to get used to some of the basic concepts. Although they will end up using GEOLocate all the time in the database it definitely helped to have them work without it at first, that way they understood the kind of assumptions and calculations are going on behind the scenes, and to be more discerning when accepting or altering their results. Working through examples Explaining good and bad localities and basic geographical concepts Referring back to workshop presentations Working with the paper maps – It seemed to work well to convey basic geographic concepts such as datums.

What Worked Well—Large Group Working in pairs. Having two trained staff to stand by to assist. But the thing that worked the best was having John Wieczorek on call through Google Hangouts to get us out of trouble--mostly this was due to people using different browsers and operating system combinations along with the Georeferencing Calculator. I used many screengrabs from the various resources in my PowerPoint. I demonstrated each online tool as we went through the PowerPoint, rather than doing it all at the end. I feel this was a very effective teaching method, and have received a lot of positive feedback about the way the tools were presented. I thought having a number of short sessions worked well for groups as people could attend those sessions they felt were most applicable to what they needed.

Change anything? There was a lot of information to take in on Day 1, I think I would go through more examples before the exercises. If we had more time I would have covered paper maps, so that they also had a better understanding of the georeferencing calculator and why measurement error, scale etc. is important. I would get a more targeted set of maps at different map scales and different datums if possible. The maps I had were from many different parts of the globe, which was good, but it would be nice to have them overlap at different scales. I was surprised to learn that I assumed a greater amount of background knowledge than individuals actually possessed. I had planned on the introductory/theoretical background of geographic information systems (projections, datum, coordinate systems, sources of uncertainty, Darwin Core fields) being brief, but it turned out the be a highlight of my presentation.

Change anything? For the next training, I would like to ask for more examples from the participants ahead of time, so I can get a better idea of what their collections are like and what their specific goals and concerns are. Some topics were rushed. More time needed in the future (but the presentations were intended to be introductory so it worked). Will have hands on activities in future sessions. I would insist that people remain long enough to practice more. (It was the end of the meeting and understandably they wanted to get home.) I also would make sure that they understood all the fields in their database that they would need to document the georeferencing--we didn't go over all of the fields recommended, although I did give them a list of the fields and their definitions. Finally, instead of giving them the answers to the coordinates that they were supposed to find, I asked them to check their locations in Google Earth or Google maps by copying and pasting the coordinates into the search field. This worked well--but I forgot about the datum shift! So either I should build in a step to convert from NAD27 (topo map datum) to WGS84 used in Google Earth, or at least use it as a Teaching Moment to show them what a datum shift looks like.

Evaluation Notes Please watch for post-workshop survey(s) and follow-up Try to join us in tracking number of records georeferenced Consider contacting me (Shari Ellis) at for assistance in evaluating your workshops or training efforts