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Bio
Dr. Andrea Thomer (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan College of Information Science. She conducts interdisciplinary research on scientific data curation and on the maintenance and evolution of knowledge infrastructures. She is especially interested in database curation, integrative data reuse, and the collaborative use and curation of natural science data. Dr. Thomer earned her doctorate at the College of Information Science Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign in 2017. Prior to her graduate work, she was an excavator and ad hoc data curator at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California.
Abstract
Natural history collections constitute an important and complex knowledge infrastructure (KI). The heterogeneous data in these collections can include specimens, genomes, field notes, environmental data, and more -- all of which have huge potential for reuse in biodiversity, medicine, climate science, agriculture, and other domains. However, the integrative reuse of these data is often hindered by the limitations of the media used to store them, including the sometimes decades-old databases storing collections data, and scattered paper-based data archives and field notes. By better understanding existing maintenance practices in these KI we can better support their maintainers’ work – and build more robust KI going forward.
In this talk, I’ll discuss my work on natural history data curation, including the maintenance and migration of natural history databases, and the digitization and mobilization of historical data. I also discuss my anticipated future work showing the impact of natural history collections, and in further supporting the curation and integrative reuse of scientific data.