Useful things > On-line recording

On-line recording resources

Indicia

Indicia is a toolkit that simplifies the construction of new websites which allow data entry, mapping and reporting of wildlife records. It simplifies the construction of new websites which allow data entry, mapping and reporting of wildlife records. It’s not a finished online survey website – think of Indicia as a kit car as opposed to a manufactured car. You get the wheels, engine and all the important tricky bits ready-made, but you still have to assemble the parts.

To find out more go to the Indicia Wiki of for help in setting up your site go to the NBN forum

Don't worry if you are not a web developer as we have tools that enable you to build your site within the website content management systems Drupal and Joomla

Drupal

Drupal is a content management system that greatly eases the task of managing a website. In particular many of the extensions that already exists for it make it very applicable to hosting biodiversity related sites (such as that for a National Scheme or Local Record Centre) and further extensions are expected to appear over the next year. There is quite a lot of interest in the system at the moment, particularly across the biodiversity community – for example it has been adopted by the highly publicised Encyclopedia of Life. JNCC are in the process of producing a couple of guides on applying Drupal 6 in this way and early drafts of these are available below. For more details on Drupal visit their website http://drupal.org/

Emerging Drupal bioinformatics group http://groups.drupal.org/bioinformatics

Scratchpads

Within the UK the Natural History Museum have led the development of an implementation of Drupal known as Scratchpads (link). This is particularly aimed at taxonomists but could also potentially be adopted by a national scheme to give an initial web presence with very little cost.

Scratchpad links:

Main Scratchpad Site (includes link to apply for a Scratchpad) http://scratchpads.eu

Scratchpad project modules http://home.scratchpads.eu/

Scratchpad SVN repository http://svn.scratchpads.eu/viewvc/scratchpads/

BMC Bioinformatics paper http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/S14/S6

Google group setup to share ideas and experience on applying Drupal http://groups.google.com/group/scratchpads

Drupal guides:

On-line Tutorial on setting up a species website.

This following web cast is the presentation given by Stuart Ball at the NBN Technical Seminar in November 2009. Stuart shows you how you can build your own recording website using Drupal.

Setting up a species portal using Drupal (1.6 MB)

This PDF shows you how you can quickly set up your own species recording site using the content management system - Drupal. Use this document to support the tutorial above.

Building a Drupal website (1.6 MB)

Guidance document on building a Drupal website for Indicia