Multiple communities: Botanical data from citizen scientists for digital repositories

This paper describes the data-managing activities of members of the Australian Plants Society of Victoria, a well-established organisation of volunteers with a passion for Australian plants and conservation. Four recurrent themes emerged from a research project, showing commonalities between the attitudes and behaviours of this community of citizen scientists and other communities which rely on information and communications technologies for community development and for community archives. In this study semi-structured interviews and a survey revealed the current data storage and management practices of the APSV, what current attitudes exist to sharing, whether such practices and attitudes facilitate extensive sharing of research data, and suggestions as to how to improve skills and technologies for making further contributions to large digital repositories. The project is continuing.