Working from home - turning problems into solutions

In the core store at BGS, we are heavily reliant on our team of three technicians. They take our incoming material in the form of core, cuttings or other samples, and enter it onto our database, and then store the material in our core store where it can be accessed by visiting researchers. If you've ever visited the BGS core store, then the material you looked at will have been laid out on the examination benches by one of them.

The sudden onset of lockdown at the end of March meant that progress on all of these activities ceased, practically overnight. Fortunately, we had a long list of "back-burner" activities that we were able to bring up. Many of our staff were also generous enough to volunteer the loan of their own IT equipment amidst a global laptop shortage.

Here, Neil Stacey, one of our Curating Technicians, shares his home working setup:

"In the photo, you can see:

• Personal Apple Mac version 10.6 using 17” screen for Excel .xls data input
• Personal 9” iPad for viewing and downloading marine images
• Personal clock to see how much time spent on data input
• Personal ruler for measuring how long I have been inputting data(!)
• Personal phone to order takeaways...

We loaded a number of photographs of pallets of our Marine samples onto ShareFile (our corporate filesharing platform), which I was then able to download to my iPad. Working from home I have been able to extract handwritten data on the ends of the boxes into an Excel spreadsheet. This has included:

There can be a lot of data trapped in handwritten annotations

• 26,000 marine sample locations, almost all matched to existing barcode data
• 5,000 miscellaneous borehole entries
• 497 Hydrographic Office samples
• 146 Entries relating to the Falkland Isles
• 2,180 Shallow commercial UK continental shelf samples

So in a few short weeks of lockdown, I have been able to enhance the data we hold on about thirty  three thousand items in our collection."

As life begins to return to normal, we will import this into our corporate database, where it will be extremely useful and will really improve the day to day operation of our marine samples collection.

Thank you, Neil!