[obol] Plaudits on new Oregon Birds fieldnotes format

[Joel Geier]

Hello folks,

As Dave Tracy mentioned, we're in the final stages of getting the
detailed regional compilations for Spring 2006 up on the Oregon Field
Ornithologists (OFO) website at <www.oregonbirds.org>. These will be
good for digging into the details beyond those covered in Dave Irons'
excellent statewide overview of the season. 

The regional compilations are in spreadsheet format which makes it
possible to sort the data by species, region, county, etc. Names of
observers, counties and places are spelled out in full, so we can get
rid of those huge tables of three- and four-letter codes, which have
been an editor's nightmare ever since they were dreamt up.

Besides the regional compilers, we owe a big round of thanks to the four
volunteers who converted existing text columns into the new spreadsheet
format! Phil Hicks and Ron Halvorson took care of this for the Spring
2006 batch of field notes. Diana Brin and Bob Lockett did this for
columns that were written for the next two seasons. All of them did a
great job and went beyond what I was expecting.

We wound up with more volunteers than we had columns to be converted. So
I'd like to also recognize Devon Batley, Karl Fairchild, Paul Sullivan,
Ron Maertz, and Scott Carpenter for their offers to help, even though we
ran out of files for them to help with.

We're doing a last round of QA on these, after finding a couple of
places where our old bugbear, those three-letter codes for observers,
rose up to bite us again (even though we're jettisoning those codes,
some of the data for this batch were in the old format).

Then, as Dave mentioned, OFO needs to decide exactly how to post these
on the website -- whether as pdfs, downloadable spreadsheets, or both.
Hopefully this can be accomplished within a few days, and we can inform
OBOL when this is done. 

The process should go more smoothly for the subsequent seasons that are
in the pipeline. The long-term goal is to get caught up to the point
where regional compilations are available within a couple of months
after each field season, and (I hope) get the spreadsheets into a
database that's linked to the OFO website.

Good birding,
Joel

--
Joel Geier 
(the birder formerly known as JeG, not to be confused with JG, JoG, JGe,
JGr, et al.)
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis 
(formerly known as "nr. EEW")