Welcome to our website for the Paleo Data Working Group! We are a community of practice centered around collections-based paleo and informatics professionals. Keep reading to see our current projects, or learn more about us here.

Happy Hours

The Paleo Data Working Group “happy hours” are informal, biweekly discussions about various different topics, including those related to data standards for paleontology collections, digitizing collections, and general collections management. Discussion topics are collaboratively developed, presented, and discussed by working group members, and supplemented with invited speakers when appropriate. No registration is required and anyone is welcome to attend any happy hour.

See a schedule of upcoming happy hour topics, as well as recordings and materials from past happy hours here.

Resources

We maintain resources to help collections professionals with the digitization and data management of paleontology collections. See here for a list of these resources.

Guidelines

We also publish guidelines, or more formalized documents, for distribution and reuse by the broader community. Find links to our published guidelines here. In progress guidelines can be found listed on the Resources page.

Workshops

This group has hosted several workshops. Detailed information for each of these is linked from the Workshops page.

Outreach

Members of the Paleo Data Working Group regularly participate in contributing talks, workshops, or other events to the broader scientific community. View a list of these talks here.

How to get involved

Any and all paleontology collections professionals are encouraged to join. Many members have long professional memberships, but newer, early career professionals are more than welcome to join. We use the following tools for this community of practice:

Slack: Our primary tool for asynchronous conversations/discussions about topics or ask questions on anything digitization- or collections management-related. To join the Slack workspace click here. If you are unfamiliar with Slack, see this 3-minute video overview of how to use it up for the Paleo Data workspace.

Google Group: A listserv where we post announcements about upcoming happy hours, workshops, or other events of interest. Request to join the Google Group here.

GitHub: We have a newly established presence on GitHub here. Please stayed tuned as we determine how GitHub will integrated into our existing suite of community tools.

Google Drive: Our shared folder on Google Drive is a place where we can store working documents that do not fit well on GitHub yet. Please request access if you think you should be enabled to edit files in this folder.