Todd M. Smith and Sandra G. Porter, Digital World Biology®, Seattle, WA
Modern data collection technologies are creating enormous data resources that are underutilized in science education and research. We often present graphs showing exponential growth of one kind of database or another, but how often do we stop to ask the questions: how many people are using these data? And how are they using it? Without efforts toward improving general use, data resources will not be valued, which can negatively impact the value of future data collection endeavors.