EDIT - European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy -

An EDIT and SYNTHESYS initiative, hosted by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels

On 4 and 5 November, 2008 EDIT and SYNTHESYS held a joint meeting on how and what natural history collections can do to broaden the user base of their collection services.

In this context the meeting brought together 37 participants, collection managers, conventional users, non-conventional users and other stakeholders. The morning programme consisted of presentations on different collections management policies and uses of collections (data and objects). The two afternoon sessions were devoted to discussions in break-out groups and in a plenary setting - addressing how natural history institutions, individual researchers and networks like EDIT and SYNTHESYS can contribute to open-up collections for a broader use.

The presentations offered rich examples on the potential of uses of collections services in the fields of: agriculture: population genetics; environmental monitoring; public health; in the academic field of humanities; research policy and many others. The discussions generated useful insights and recommendations on benefits and costs for institutions when working with a broader user community. Furthermore, several concrete activities were listed to improve communication with users and on how to improve specific collections services for the broader user community. Thanks to the contributions of all participants the meeting was successful in being very informative and in creating a social setting for networking and for future collaborations.

If you are interested to read more on this workshop, you can find the meeting documents below:
- Broadening the user base of NH collections (flyer)
- Agenda and abstracts
- List of participants
- Summary report of the workshop (available in the course of December 2008)