South Australian Museum Ornithology Collection

This section houses over 55,000 registered and 6,000 unregistered specimens including skins, eggs, skeletons, nests and spirit collections. It has an excellent collection of South Australian species, both historical and recent, a large collection of stomach contents, which is used to determine diets, and an Australia wide collection of eggs.

The SA Museum manages this dataset using the KE EMu collection management system. It is interpreted into the Darwin Core metadata schema (DwC) and semi-regularly exported to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA: http://www.ala.org.au/) and the Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums (OZCAM: http://www.ozcam.org.au/). Information about Darwin Core can be found here: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm. Data sourced from Australian museums on both the ALA and OZCAM should be identical, but on ALA they are combined with observational data from citizen science initiatives and other sources.

Both of those sites make it possible to combine, interrogate and analyse data through web services such as the Spatial Analysis Portal (http://spatial.ala.org.au/). In the Spatial Portal ALA data can be combined with meteorological and other environmental data sourced from and made accessible by relevant government agencies.

Data about endangered species are either withheld from online publication, or coordinates or other data are obscured on the ALA and OZCAM. In those circumstances more specific information is available directly from SA Museum collection managers if it is genuinely required for research purposes.
SA Museum data can be downloaded in full from the Atlas of Living Australia, or broken down into discipline specific parts (e.g. Herpetology, Mammalogy etc). On download the ALA will request an email address (not mandatory) and a reason for download (mandatory) – this is required to track usage of the ALA data to help data providers determine priorities for upload and improvement.