Poster by: Justin Parker, Geoscience Australia. 

Geoscience Australia is responsible for rock, mineral and fossil specimens vested to the Commonwealth of Australia, including specimens belonging to the Commonwealth Palaeontological Collection. Representing samples from the surface and subsurface geology of Australia and its offshore regions, the holdings contain some of the most extensive reference collections of Australian earth materials and span the geological timescale from the Archean to the Holocene.

In order to make material more accessible for research, Geoscience Australia is developing a framework for online access to its databases of specimens, including an image gallery. The project aims to adopt international metadata standards including Natural Collections Descriptions (for the collections), Darwin Core (for taxonomic information), and Dublin Core (for images and documents about material in the collections). It is hoped that Geoscience Australia’s collections databases will contribute to global natural history museum and geoscience
virtual research networks. The first phase of this project is to provide access to the microfossil component which comprises 40,000 primary and secondary type specimens.