Creating a Collection

You’re now going to create a collection for your project. This collection will be used in several places and ways:

1. To populate select lists when choosing a species to record
2. To populate an ID Guide

Most collections are groups of items that belong together logically. Collections can be anything from a set of numeric values to data describing geospatial boundaries. Each entry in a collection is called an item. Items may comprise a single piece of data to be used within your project (such as a number in a form) or be more detailed. In this case our items will be storing:

1. The common name of the species
2. The scientific name of the species
3. A general description of the species

You can create collections directly in Coreo, or you can import them from another source such as a spreadsheet. The latter will generally be easier for managing collections of more than a few items.

In order to use a spreadsheet as a source file the spreadsheet has to have a certain structure. Each item in any collection must have at least two attributes:

1. A key (a unique id given to each item in the collection)
2. A value (usually the human readable label of the item)

Each attribute of a collection occupies a column of your spreadsheet, with a header row as shown below. There must be one column with the field type = key and one with field type = value.

For the purposes of this exercise we have provided a .csv file with all the information you need to create a collection for your project.

Importing your collection

• Choose Configuration from the menu and then select Collections

• Click on New Collection

• Choose From CSV

• Give your collection a logical name and then navigate to the coreo tutorial folder and select the app-data.csv file. Click the [Create] button to complete the import of your data.

You should now see your collection appear in Coreo.

Adding Media to an Item

• Select the first item in the collection by clicking on it. This will launch the detailed view of the item – in this case, Red-eyed Tree Frog. In this view you can edit fields like the scientific name and description text.
• Select the Add Media button and then navigate to the coreo tutorial/media folder that you downloaded earlier.
• Select all three of the ‘redeye’ images to import them

You can change the order of images by dragging and dropping any image to a new position.

Note that your media are saved to items automatically, so there is no ‘Save’ button.

• Use the breadcrumb trail at the top left to navigate back to the collection summary (‘species‘ in this case)

• Now upload the media for the next item, until you have added images for all the items. (Note that images just use the first word of the species name; e.g. ‘Tomato Frog’ images all start ‘tomato’)
• Once you have added all of the images, navigate back to the Configuration menu using the breadcrumb trail or side panel.