3rd User Conference - Summary, Slides and Recordings*

The 3rd User Conference was held at Cambridge University Botanic Garden on Friday 18^thof May 2018.

This year, roughly 40 delegates from Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden and the UK came together to get inspired, to learn from other users and to grow the collective expertise.

For the 3^rdtime the organising committee put together a programme consisting mainly of presentations from the user community. The presentations focus on community driven problem solving. Many of these discussions and presentations are not necessarily directly related to the capabilities of software, but they invariably give us very useful input on how we can further improve the software.

Please, have a look at the programme below, the presentations and the recordings.

Paul Smith, Secretary General of BGCI, opened the conference with a keynote speech on “Why botanic gardens need to share their collections and data with broader society”. This essentially contributed to keeping the discussions broad throughout the day, keeping in mind the ultimate goal of most botanic gardens – protecting the biodiversity of our world.

We would like to especially thank Paul Smith and the speakers from the user community for sharing the challenges they are facing in their daily work, and the delegates for thinking with them and contributing with their knowledge. This made all of us grow!

We would also like to thank Pete Atkinson and the Cambridge University Botanic Garden for providing a very special location and being a warm-hearted host. Last but not least, we would like to thank Reinout Havinga and the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam for putting together a great programme and for tirelessly activating the user community.

Join us next year in Gothenborg on 29 April 2019!

Havard Ostgaard & Margherita Tinti

* December 2019: This post was originally published under the title “3rd European IrisBG User Conference”. After the collaboration on the IrisBG software package ended on December 6^th 2019, Botanical Software changed the name of its products and services to Floria. To avoid confusion about Botanical Software’s current involvement with IrisBG, we felt we needed to change the title of this post. The conference covers many generic topics about collection management and record keeping. We have for this reason decided to keep this material available as a useful resource. Strongly committed to our collaboration with the community, we will continue to organize conferences, workshops and other events.

Opening and Welcome
Margherita Tinti, Community Manager, Botanical Software
Pete Atkinson, Plant Records Officer, University of Cambridge Botanic Garden
Reinout Havinga, Head Garden and Collection, Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam

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Key Note Speech & Workshop
Why botanic gardens need to share their collections and data with broader society
Paul Smith, Secretary General, BGCI

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View recording
View posters – group work

Workshop 1 – Accessible data: at what cost?
Åsa Kruger, Scientific Curator and Mats Havström, Head of Research and Collections, Gothenburg Botanic Garden

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View posters – group work

Session 1 – Making the effort

Westonbirt Arboretum – How to make our mapping geographically accurate
Alison Vry, Database & Records Officer, Westonbirt, The National Arboretum

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Multilingual data entry – at what cost?
Ralf Omlor, Curator, Botanic Garden of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

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Session 2 – Optimizing your work flow

Importing collection data. Using the import function to import field collection data into accessions and update Items.
Pete Atkinson, Plant Records Officer, University of Cambridge Botanic Garden

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View recording

Cleaning the cupboard: how to prioritize between stock taking efficiency and plant history recording
Chantal Posthouwer, Collection Manager a.i., Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam

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Unfortunately, due to technical issues, there is no recording of this session.

Workshop 2 – Mobile Plant Records
Havard Ostgaard, Botanical Software

The recommendations received during this session are very much appreciated – it improved the app considerably. Expected date of release: end of the summer 2018.

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Session 3 – Inclusive collection management