Within this years budget (pooled from steering group) there were insufficient resources to really develop any significant enhancements to Recorder 6, however, I am very pleased to announce that an additional £25k has become available through a joint DEFRA / Natural England initiative to develop the LRC network in England. One of the projects within this was tasked with improving efficiency in data capture and management and is being led by Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre. In essence SxBRC feel that enhancing the functionality of Recorder would reap the greatest benefits and have been working with JNCC to identify potential improvements.

We have used comments and suggestions made by other users and our own experiences to put together a list of enhancements which we feel would improve the efficiency of data capture and management (a draft ‘Copy of Annex 1 Proposed enhancements from V1-3-5’ is available to download from the Uploads page see http://forums.nbn.org.uk/uploads.php). We have also widened the scope of the Recorder steering group and have invited 4 representative users (each suggested by the country agencies) who will attend at least 1 meeting per year to discuss the general direction of the project and/or specific developments. This group will help to prioritise the potential enhancements outlined against the funding available and these changes will be included in the next version of Recorder 6 released (est. to be released in March next year).

Bearing in mind the changes must make a demonstrable difference to the efficiency of data capture and management in local record centres, if you feel strongly that a particular enhancement should be included please post a reply here, add your suggestions to the following post - http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=420 or alternatively add a post to the feature requests section of this forum. Please give reasons why you think that particular change would improve efficiency.

Many thanks once again for your input,

Best wishes,