The data entry project is a long term effort to get the existing BRC records computerised. The project has been running for a couple of years now and at present we have four people keying records. Since I last wrote about the project Richard Nicol has been continuing to work on completing the smaller animal kingdom groups (mostly invertebrates). This has proved to be very useful as a number of national invertebrate recorders have been requesting record lists, and it is somewhat easier to print the records out rather than transcribing them from the record cards.
Martyn Hodgson and Patrick Taylor have been keying in the historical (i.e. pre Worcestershire Flora Project) flowering plant records. John Partridge having brought the spider records up to date, is now working on the fungi records (good luck to him!).
Since each person works pretty well independently, its hard to say exactly how many records have been keyed so far. The animal kingdom stands at about 50,000 records, whilst the number of flowering plant records has reached about 30,000. The rate of record entry is very variable as well. Plant records are easy to do, as there are few problems with nomenclature, whilst the small invertebrate groups can be very difficult to work on.
An interesting recent development has been that Mike Averill has supplied us with a computerised version of all of the dragonfly records he used to create his book The Dragonflies of Worcestershire. These have been converted to the required format and have been loaded into Recorder. This has added over 10,500 records. Mike has also promised us his more recent records as well. This type of contribution is incredibly valuable to the BRC (and it's greatly appreciated by those of us doing the typing!).
If you have any questions about this project, please let me know. Enquiries via e:mail usually gets the quickest response: martyn_hodgson@compuserve.com.
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