Published

2026-10-23

Record Types

Understanding Projects, Products, and Contacts

Contacts, projects, and products are all record types. While each is entered independently, all share a relationship in mdEditor.

Projects

A project encompasses a discrete research or data collection effort on a particular topic with defined goals or objectives. The target projects for a Science Catalog are science projects whose topics and resulting products have value to partners or the public to discover and access them. Many projects are the result of FWS financial assistance agreements, contracts, or inter-agency agreements. However, not everything funded through one of these mechanisms needs to be in the Science Catalog. For example, a contract to maintain an individual website likely does not quality as a “science project” nor does it provide public-relevant information. A grant to develop an interactive landscape-conservation tool, however, would be a science project that results in public-relevant information.

Science projects can also include other defined efforts that did not necessarily require the awarding of funds (i.e. internal efforts).

Products

A product is a resource, usually (but not necessarily) developed as an output from a project. Products can be tools, data, maps, reports, presentations, workshops, etc. These will usually be the direct result of a project though there may be some products without a parent project.

Not every output of a project is necessarily a product, however. For example, meeting minutes do not have standalone value to be a publicly available resource. It is up to each data manager to determine which outputs should be entered as products.

Contacts

Contacts are the individuals and organizations involved with projects and products (e.g., investigators, collaborators, funders). Contacts are entered once in mdEditor and can be used in multiple projects and products.

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Relationships

Projects and Products will always have a relationship with contacts. Projects will always have at least one point of contact. Additional contact relationships may include project principal investigator, collaborators, funders, publishers, distributors, and many others.

  • Contact types are specified in the contact record (examples: federal, state, NGO).
  • Specific roles for each contact are defined within the respective project and product records (examples: principal investigator, collaborator).
  • Organizations may be added to projects and products with defined roles.
  • Individual contacts are also associated with an organization.

{% hint style=“info” %} Contact types are specified in the contact record (examples: federal, state, NGO). Specific roles for each contact are defined within the respective project and product records (examples: principal investigator, collaborator). {% endhint %}

Products are often the results of projects. mdEditor defines the relationships between projects and products through the Associated function.

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