Please ignore my earlier message that was not well phrased. What I meant to offer was an observation and suggestion about the various options we have for reporting bird sightings around Canberra. It has been discussed before but I, and I am sure many others, have missed some important points. I did not mean to write an advertisement for Birdline (Eremaea), and was originally only calling for an obvious rationalisation one way or the other, but now that I’ve learnt more about its existing capabilities, the below now is a bit of an advertisement for changing from members entering sightings to the COG database to members entering via Birdline.
At the moment, when a COG member returns from a successful day at Kelly's swamp, they might decide to do the following with their observations:
- enter them into their own private list/record system, which might be a paper book or computer or phone based software etc.
- enter them to the COG Database (from where they can eventually find their way to the national BA system)
- enter them to Birdline (Eremaea)
- and then post the fact that they saw a sandpiper or godwit to the Chatline.
Very few people will do all of these, and even less will do all of them regularly. As a result many good observations are missed by either of the databases. The integrity and usefulness of these databases is proportional to the number of entries and the completeness of the entries made, so we are clearly not making the best use of resources to split a fewer number of reported sightings in several directions.
The technology exists, if we want to use it, to either combine some of these databases or more likely, the entry of data to them, so that people only have to enter things once or twice. My suggestion is that because of the significant advantages, COG should in its own interests and the interests of its members, investigate the rationalisation of data entry.
I understand that Birdline already offers the capability to do much of the rationalisation and therefore we should seriously consider using it instead of entering to the COG database.
- entering to Birdline is much simpler and more reliable.
- the information posted to Birdline is (if you tick a box) passed to BA and therefore eventually finds its way back to the COG database so you are getting your info to ALL the relevant databases with a single posting.
- data on Birdline is accessible to all, that is, you can interrogate it to find out when you last saw a Bar-tailed Godwit, or (I think) how many have been seen in the ACT region, and when etc.
- you can elect to be notified automatically (by email from Birdline) at every sighting of nominated birds, so you could know quickly as soon as a Painted Snipe etc arrived by a system that already exists.
There are complications including how to handle paper-based entries, ownership and integrity of data, possibly COG paying for the Eremaea service, and getting people familiar with a new system and its capabilities, but these are easily solvable and I believe it would be in the best interests of COG, its database and its members to embrace some kind of rationalisation as soon as possible.
The above system could be further improved by modifying some home-based bird database systems so that they are able to automatically submit each report to BIrdline. Then even people who elected to keep their own home-based system would only have to enter data once. Imagine the extra number of sightings that would end up in the COG database if we had such a system. Is there any reason that I’ve missed for COG to keep the current data entry arrangement?
Julian
