BRERC Metadata

Information about the BRERC Meta-Data List

The list of BRERC meta-data is sourced from our internal meta-database, which is essentially a working tool for BRERC purposes.

Meta-data is information about data, similar to the contents list of a book. BRERC uses MetaTagger as its meta-database.

The database continues to be updated and the list should not be considered complete nor reflective of all of the BRERC data holdings.

This list was produced in July 2007.

Because it is sourced from an internal working tool some of the information may not make obvious sense to others. The actual meta-database contains many more fields that are not shown here.

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) and English Nature provided some funds for BRERC to evaluate MetaTagger on their behalf, and some additional funds for BRERC to begin entering information as part of the South West NBN Pilot Project. This funding enabled BRERC to make recommendations about MetaTagger and to enter approximately 850 entries for submission to the NBN Index. Subsequently BRERC has amended these and have continued to add more, so that we now have over 4000 entries.

BRERC has a strict policy to not publish inappropriate personal information, names and addresses. We have screened this list prior to making it available, but if you should discover any information that you feel should not be included then please contact BRERC and we will consider it's removal.

Explanation of the Fields:

ID_NO
Unique reference number for each entry

TITLE
Title of the document, data set or archive. This is a BRERC assigned title and not necessarily the actual title.

ABSTRACT
Brief description of the information, assigned by BRERC

PURPOSE
Reason for the survey, document, report, assigned by BRERC

DOC_NO
Internal BRERC Document number

10km_Square
The 10 kilometre grid square the information refers to. This field can be used to search for information by the 10 kilometre grid square.

Year
Year the information refers to (generally the last relevant year is entered here). This field can be used to search for information by the year

Glossary for some terms used in the list:

BLISS
Biological Location Information Site System. Refers to one of our paper filing systems for wildlife information. The accompanying codes are internal filing codes for this system.

BREXT
BRERC External document. Refers to reports BRERC has produced for external clients. This filing system has been superceded and therefore BREXT relates to a historic filing system. The accompanying codes are internal filing codes for this system.

BRERC pub.
BRERC publication. The accompanying codes are internal filing codes for this system.

Download

These are packed Winzip files, containing the BRERC metadata. Also included is an explanation of the dataset. Please download the version appropriate to your computer.

Please consider OpenOffice.org, a free office suite completely compatible with other major office suites. Download it for free here - www.openoffice.org. For more details on OpenOffice.org, see the article about OpenOffice.

The tab delimited text file should open in any spreadsheet program.

BRERC Metadata - Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet packed with Winzip

BRERC Metadata - Tab Delimited CSV Text File packed with Winzip