What is an Organizational Management Team?

As described in Projects and Teams, an organizational-management team is a team that has special privileges associated with a particular "organization record" that the team is "linked to" in MorphoSource.  As a Museum or other collection institution, it is important to recognize that more than likely an "organization record" for your institution has already been created in MorphoSource without any action on your part. This usually happens by un-affiliated scholars uploading data representing your specimens.  In order for such data to be contributed with proper provenance, we had to create a record for your organization. The information in the organization record was input by our data curator based on information available on the web, from the user uploading the specimen data, or possibly via direct inquiry to staff at your institution.  If it is incorrect, let us know and we can change it. 

In any case, if a credentialed staff member from your organization expresses an interest in having some control over media representing your specimens, the way MorphoSource handles that is with an "organizational-management team".  A description of steps for creating an organizational-management team are found here: How does an Organizational Management Team get created?

In addition to special system functions, the organizational-management teams also receive priority for curation tasks related to scans of their specimens


Functions Available to Management Teams:

  1. Ability to see/find all media representing specimens from your museum/collection regardless of its publication status (e.g., private/published). Specifically, the team will gain view access to all media representing objects from their collections.  As an important note, organizational-management teams will not gain automatic edit access or management over those existing media. However, the team is able to setup their management page so that they gain edit access to future deposits (see #6 below). The MorphoSource administrators can help organization representatives to obtain consent from users who uploaded existing media to transfer management of those media to the organizational team and to deposit those media directly in the organizational-management team, so that all team managers and editors will have edit access to those media. Contact us for more information on this.
  2. Ability to set the terms of re-use for new media added when they represent specimens from your museum/collection (this is done using the Organization Permission Default form). 
  3. Ability of you and your staff to have edit access to media representing specimens from your museum/organization, as well as the specimen records themselves.
  4. Ability to receive and to approve/deny any requests for access to media representing specimens from your museum/organization.
  5. Ability to make decisions about whether to post data on other platforms aside from or in addition to MorphoSource.
  6. Ability of your organizational user account to be assigned the role of Data Manager to newly deposited media representing your specimens whenever their visibility status is changed from private to public (or immediately on submission, depending on the contributor's preference). This also grants you and your staff edit access to these media when transfer of control of these media is finished.
  7. Ability to directly edit specimen metadata when the metadata is not available through centrally published aggregated record-sets (e.g., via iDigBio or GBIF) by your organization.
  8. Ability to access limited media use statistics for your organization and individual media.


Coming Functions

  1. Ability to generate media record manifests that are pre-formatted for use with aggregators including GBIF and iDigBio.
  2. Ability to access more complete and wide-ranging media use statistics for your organization and individual media.