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

• Select ‘Collections’ from the side-panel, under the ‘Build’ header.

• Click on ‘Upload a collection’ button.

• Choose From CSV

A box will open prompting you to give your collection a name and to select your CSV.

• Type out a logical name e.g species

After you have uploaded your file, additional options will be presented. These will show you the columns that Coreo has detected as your key and value in your collection. These will be detected for you so no need to change them.

• Click the ‘Create from CSV’ button.

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 ‘+ Upload media file’ 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.