Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD)

Developed by Biodiversity Information Standards, also known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG).

Natural Collections Description (NCD) is a proposed data standard for describing collections of natural history materials at the collection level; one NCD record describes one entire collection.

Collection descriptions are electronic records that document the holdings of an organisation as groups of items, which complement the more traditional item-level records such as are produced for a single specimen or a library book. NCD is tailored to natural history. It lies between general resource discovery standards such as Dublin Core (DC) and rich collection description standards such as the Encoded Archival Description (EAD).

The NCD standard covers all types of natural history collections, such as specimens, original artwork, archives, observations, library materials, datasets, photographs or mixed collections such as those that result from expeditions and voyages of discovery.