The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) is a 3 year project, involving 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens and other cooperating institutions. The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world’s published knowledge on the discovery and subsequent description of biological diversity. However, digital access to this knowledge is difficult. The objective of the BHL-Europe project is to make available Europe’s biodiversity information to everyone by improving the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries. The project will provide a multilingual access point for biodiversity content through a global portal (BHL) with specific biological functionality and to a wide European cultural audience through Europeana. ... [Information of the supplier]
After three decades of standards development and computerization of natural history collections many millions of vouchered specimen records are available in global electronic networks. Vast numbers of specimen records remain only accessible on paper. Available records are highly variable in quality and rich in three decades worth of data capture and migration errors. Far more seriously, specimen data is being brought to the desktops of the researchers and specialists best able to correct and clean those data, without an easy means for the return of those researchers' corrections to those specimen collections. It is this very annotation by specialists that keeps natural history collections vital. We are designing and implementing a network, which we term Filtered Push, to connect remote sites where annotations can be generated with the authoritative databases of the collections holding the vouchers to which those annotations apply. ... [Information of the supplier]
The DINA project develops an open-source Web-based information management system for natural history data. At the core of the system is support for assembling, managing and sharing data associated with natural history collections and their curation ("collection management"). Target collections include zoological, botanical, geological and paleontological collections, living collections, biodiversity inventories, observation records, and molecular data. DINA is primarily intended for large installations servicing the collection management needs of a country, a region, or a large institution. DINA is developed by the DINA consortium, an unincorporated international partnership among organizations and individuals for collaborative open-source development. The DINA consortium was founded in 2014 by six natural history collection institutions in Europe and North America and is open to additional members as detailed below. The DINA acronym stands for "DIgital Information system for NAtural history data", and has its roots in a Swedish initiative to replace a heterogeneous collection of unsustainable in-house databases with a modern, Web-based national collection management system. ... [Information of the supplier]