BoF Metadata Standards for attribution of physical and digital collections stewardship

Collections of physical specimens are an important tool for understanding the Earth, its systems, and human interaction. Unfortunately, many collections are not being actively digitized or digitally curated to their full potential, and physical curation support for collection digitization can be difficult to achieve. Part of the reason for this is the lack of professional reward for curatorial and digitization actions. One strategy for incentivizing collection curation is to create infrastructure for attributing curatorial and digitization actions. Some basic infrastructure exists to make this happen, but the pieces still have not come together to result in an actionable metric. In order to advance e-infrastructure in this area, we proposed a Working Group to investigate existing attribution metadata schema, develop a new schema to fill in gaps, and work with aggregators of research actions to include curation and digitization actions in their reporting. This meeting will introduce the RDA community to a new, potential working group, which stems from previous activities of the Biodiversity Data Integration IG. The case statement for the WG is expected to be under review at the time of the 7th Plenary.