iRecord in Sussex

An attempt to illustrate how the iRecord system works.

Since 2013, the Sussex recording community has devoted thousands of hours to submitting and verifying records using iRecord. 

SxBRC has been hearing a range of perspectives on iRecord, ranging from: “It’s all good!” through to, “It’s the most user unfriendly program I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.” 

We wanted to capture this whole spectrum of feedback and use it as a basis for influencing future development of iRecord and prioritising actions we could take locally, in Sussex, to improve how we capture, process and share data.

To that end, we've produced this discussion document on Sussex & iRecord: A County Perspective on Using iRecord (you can click on the link to download it as a .pdf) and thought I'd share it here, in case anyone else is interested.

We have identified a range of priorities, from our County perspective, for future development of iRecord and related systems. These include:

• Addressing performance issues
• Developing better handling of rare and sensitive species
• Refining the ‘view’ for verifiers
• More dialogue needed with recording schemes about how to manage over-lapping verifier roles
• Working together to explore options for more auto-verification and better validation
• Improvements to the UK Species Inventory (UKSI)
• More contextual information for recorders when entering records
• Consistency in download format
• Ongoing provision of training and technical support

We look forward to working with the Biological Record Centre and other members of the National Biodiversity Network to address these priorities.

Thank you to all the Sussex recorders and iRecord verifiers who've provided feedback to inform this document.

And thanks to David Roy, Martin Harvey and Karolis Kazlauskis at the Biological Record Centre for their comments and help in understanding how the whole system works.