Welcome to the STERNA portal for birdwatchers

During the past year, organizations that collect and manage digital content on nature and wildlife from ten European countries have been working together in the STERNA project to create a comprehensive information space on birds. With these efforts, STERNA supports the goals and objectives of Europeana, the European digital library initiative.

The STERNA information space features a wealth of content that is interrelated and made findable through the internet: from pictures, movies and 3D-images to field recordings, type specimens and ethnographic objects.

Search portal 

This search portal is one of our project results. The portal has been developed with birdwatchers in mind, one of the targeted user groups in STERNA. Its goal is to enable users to search for content on bird species in more than one way and to refine search results in an intuitive manner.

The portal provides several different ways to search for content items in the STERNA information space, each approaching the content from a different angle. The quick search box can either search for species and taxon names (scientific names, but also local names in different European languages) or perform a free text search. Advanced options include search filters for information type, language, persons and organisations, content providers (e.g. all material from NCB Naturalis), date, and location.

Prototype

This portal is a prototype, and should not be seen as a functional end product. During the development process, we invite target users to help us at certain points in time with identifying and tackling problems, matching the target user's needs, and optimising the usability. In the meantime, the project partners are adding more content, which will improve the number of search results that this portal has to offer.

The first round of user validation (in the form of online questionnaire) has been completed at February 22, 2010. The second version of the portal became available in April 2010. The next round of user validation, in the form of a focus group, was held on May 26 2010 at NCB Naturalis, Leiden (NL). In July/September 2010, a new version of the portal was released. This version was then subjected to usability tests with several target users (birdwatchers) and adjusted based on the outcome. A new versioin became available in early December 2010. An online questionnaire (identical to the one used in the first round) is now open for this version of the search portal. The results will be compared with the results from the first questionnaire, to see if our improvements have had any effect on user experience.

If you wish to know more about the STERNA project, its objectives and its methods, please visit http://www.sterna-net.eu. Any questions regarding the birdwatcher portal can be mailed here.

- The STERNA Consortium.

Project partners
 
       
       
       
  

The STERNA project is supported and partly funded by the eContentplus program.

Birds banner has been made from photos shared under Creative Commons Licenses by Flickr users Dave Maher, Jeroen Latour and Steve Voght.