From 2003, all Staffordshire bird records are being logged on a computer database. This means you can submit records at any time of the year — either by post in the usual manner to the County Recorder or by e-mail to staffs-recorder@westmidlandbirdclub.com. The collection of computerised records is being trialled by Staffordshire with a view to rolling out to the other three counties in our region at a later date.
It will really help us if you can submit records as early as possible — there's no need to wait until the end of the year. If you have one, or a few, sightings to tell us about, please e-mail them now to the address above. If you are a regular Staffordshire recorder, you can now submit monthly, quarterly, twice-yearly or at year end, whichever suits you.
The essential items to submit are:
If you can supply an OS grid reference for your location(s), that will be a great help but it is not essential. Likewise, comments are optional, but it would help if you could enter breeding information here if this is relevant. "Date" can be a single date (as dd/mm/yyyy), a date range, or just a month for monthly maxima. If you do supply monthly maxima data, please indicate as such by entering 'monthly maxima' in the comments.
If you are lucky enough to find a rarity (as defined in the County lists), please enter as much information as possible, to indicate how you came to identify the bird, and submit each in a separate document or e-mail. Please note that rarity records will not be entered onto the database until they have been reviewed and accepted by either the County rarities committee, or where necessary, the British Birds Rarities Committee 
. We're not just interested in rarities, though - it is really important for us to receive common bird data, so please send any information you have on birds in the county.
If you have just a few sightings to tell us about, an ordinary e-mail, to staffs-recorder@westmidlandbirdclub.com, will be fine. For larger groups of records, you can, if you wish, submit a plain text or Microsoft Word document, or a spreadsheet. Microsoft Office/ Excel spreadsheets are fine, but if you don't have these products, most other spreadsheet programmes' output is readable, especially if you send either a "tab delimited text" or "comma sparated variable" (CSV) format file. You can also create these in Word or any text editor.
Here are some sample files, with our preferred layout, which you can download, then edit to include your data before returning them:
We are holding our data in a MapMate database, so if you hold your records in MapMate too, please contact us for some guidelines on how to "replicate" your records.
If you have any questions or queries, please feel free to ask for advice.
We look forward to receiving your records — thanks for taking the time to submit them!
Ornithology in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire & the West Midlands county, since 1929.
Fetched from http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/records/digital on Friday 03 September 2010 07:33:47
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