Introducing “CVColl”

In September and October 2024, the Symbiota Support Hub worked closely with Dakota Rowsey, the CSVColl Portal Manager, to host a Portal Advancement Campaign for the Consortium of Small Vertebrate Collections (CSVColl.org). Office hours enabled technical support and provided networking opportunities for members of this community. Notably, as part of this campaign, the community decided to rebrand to reflect its growing membership. Following a community survey, to which 24 individuals responded, the portal was renamed to the Consortium of Vertebrate Collections (“CVColl”) on October 16, 2024. The Symbiota Support Hub extends sincere thanks to all community members who proposed new names for the portal, as well those who voted in the renaming survey.  

Following a call for suggested new names, in October 2024, the vertebrate collections community voted to use the name Consortium of Vertebrate Collections for their Symbiota data portal. The results of this survey are shown above.

Additional campaign accomplishments included: 

  • Updating the portal’s code base to Symbiota 3.1, which updated the portal’s look and feel, as well as activated a suite of new features 
  • Adding 4.5k names to the portal’s taxonomic thesaurus 
  • Sending 1,195 new records to GBIF 
  • Adding 24 URLs to collections with records in GRSciColl (example
  • Engaging 17 portal community members at one or more Office Hours meetings 
  • Updating 13 contacts 
  • Publishing 1 new collection to GBIF (shout-out to SJSU!) 

Collections interested in participating in CVColl should contact Dakota Rowsey (CSVCollAdmin@asu.edu) or the Symbiota Support Hub (help@symbiota.org).