Symbiota workshop at SPNHC 2025

[Katelin Pearson]

Symbiota portal users and enthusiasts-

Mark your calendars for a Symbiota half-day training workshop at this year's Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) 2025 meeting in Lawrence, Kansas on Saturday, May 31.

This is an excellent opportunity to build your skills (or the skills of your technicians, students, collections managers, etc.) in data management. Please consider joining! More information can be found on the SPNHC website.

Abstract:Symbiota (https://symbiota.org/) is a popular collection management and aggregator software used by over 1000 collections to actively digitize and manage their natural history specimen data in over 60 online data portals. Symbiota portals are designed to be user friendly for all levels of experience, and as such, the complexity of the underlying data structure may sometimes be “hidden” from the user’s view. In this workshop, we will provide a deeper dive into key elements of the Symbiota database structure to demystify why certain tools function the way that they do. Proposed topics include: taxonomic thesaurus, geographic thesaurus, associated identifiers, indexing of people names, and more. Prospective participants are encouraged to vote for topics of interest discussed at this workshop via GitHub (https://github.com/BioKIC/symbiota-docs/discussions/680) or email us ideas at he...@symbiota.org.

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Katie D. Pearson

Project & Data Manager

Symbiota Support Hub, iDigBio