Case Study: Brazilian Virtual Herbarium

Abstract

The Brazilian Virtual Herbarium (BVH) is one of Brazil's National Institutes of Science and Technology (a program of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, CNPq) that has been running since 2009. The Virtual Herbarium provides an infrastructure that gathers digital records of plant specimens from primary source, mainly in Brazil, and makes them available through a central web portal. The source herbaria have complete control over what data is made through the portal and the data collected by BVH is made fully available. BVH in common with many data infrastructures, faces challenges in retaining funding. Most funding sources are project based and as has been noted elsewhere this creates problems for the sustaining of infrastructures. BVH therefore has an interest in demonstrating the use of the data resources it hosts. Through the OCSDNet project it has strengthened its capacity in this area to develop tools showing its wide usage. Overall the BVH hosts over eight million records (as of October 2017) and received 70 billion data requests in October 2017. Its users are mainly in Brazil but there is also substantial global usage. The primary uses are for research and education. There are a broad range of educational users, including universities but also schools. Through providing a central aggregation and access point BHV provides a data infrastructure that is greater – and more useful – than the sum of its parts.

Keywords

• research data
• data management
• data sharing
• bo