Cancer research – A model for standards: Andrew Rozefelds (TMAG)

Cancer research data is fed into one national database to ensure consistent standards are met. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection Manager Andrew Rozefelds asks whether the collecting sector could learn from this model.


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Transcript
My name is Andrew Rozefelds. I work at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and I’m in charge of collections and research at the museum.

My area of responsibility covers all of the collections held at the museum. And this includes science collections, including botany, zoology, and geology. It includes cultural heritage and indigenous cultures, and also the fine art collections as well.

We’re working on the digitisation of data for the OZCAM, which is zoological collections online for Australia. We’re working on the Australian Virtual Herbarium project, which is herbarium-based records online. These both fall into the area of the Atlas of Living Australia project.

At the same time, one of the curators here is working on an electronic e-flora for Tasmania. He finished the first volume of that last year, and is working on a new part of it this year. These family treatments have been published as fascicles electronically, and they’re available to all researchers online and cover about 40 families of Tasmanian plants.

The biodiversity issues involving both herbarium and zoological collections… One of the interesting issues is issues of sensitivity of data. This comes into play when you’re looking at records for endangered species and rare species. You may not want all of that information to be accessible to the public, mainly because some of these species are endangered. And collectors will actually go out and decimate a population in some cases, particularly for some of the rare orchids and things like that.

And also just access to some areas. There’s always a risk of introducing pathogens to those areas as well. This is one of the reasons why they restricted access to the Wollemi Pine community in New South Wales, because they didn’t want to risk bringing pathogens into that area which could perhaps decimate the population.

One of the issues is to decide which data should go on the web and which data can be made accessible. But there are national protocols that they’re working towards, part of the Atlas of Living Australia project.

As people may or may not be aware, cancer is a notifiable disease in Australia. So, all records get collated and information is stored systematically, and there are World Health Organisation codes for recording data about the disease. And state governments around Australia basically collate all their cancer information in a standard template, so they can actually look at where the disease is occurring. They can look for environmental factors and things like that.

It raises interesting issues, because they put in very strict standards as to what data could go in. And all of the data is reviewed in Canberra to ensure that it is actually consistent. And it’s a model that, perhaps, museums could look at, in terms of ensuring – particularly for biodiversity data – that standards are maintained.

In the case of the cancer work, my understanding is that they record information like whether it’s a primary, secondary, or tertiary. They include information about where it was first detected, the organs affected, and the type of cancer. And all of this information goes into a national database.

And I guess, with biodiversity data, it’s the same kind of requirement. We’re trying to basically provide access to a range of stakeholders with accurate, consistent information. So, national standards are definitely needed.

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