PartnerWhere is my collection located?
There has been some recent discussion on associating the geographical coordinate of a collection or museum. If you are interested in updating your information in the Biodiversity Collection Index and not sure how to go about finding your coordinate you can follow this simple tutorial to get your location without any GPS device.
- Go to Google Maps (maps.google.com)
- Type in the city of your collection. In this example we are going to find the LSU Herbarium so we type in “Baton Rouge, LA”
Optional: You can type in the full address to get to a closer map.
- Now that we are in the general area we zoom in until we see the building that contains the collection. To find the latitude/longitude all you have to do is right click above the collection location and click the “Directions from here”
- You will now see a marker placed on the map to indicated the location
- Look to your left hand side and you will see the coordinates for this position
- Write down the coordinates and you can now use those to update your geolocation on the Biodiversity Collections Index (www.biocol.org)
Note: The first number is your latitude and the second is your longitude. When adding this in the BCI it prompts for the longitude first.
If you are planning on updating your record on BCI these instructions should help.
- Go to www.biocol.org
- Register or Login depending on if you have already setup an account
- Search for your collection
Tip: You can use quickly get to your collection by using in the search box “@code: LSU” where LSU is the name of your collection - Go down to Geolocation and click the edit button in the right hand corner
Note: If you do not have a geolocation setup you will have to click on the “Add further information” at the bottom of the page - Enter in your longitude and latitude and save
Tags: biodiversity collection index, biological collection, coordinates, geocoding, geolocation, georeferencing, herbarium location, tutorial
