The Biodiversity Heritage Library-Australia is the digital literature component of the Atlas of Living Australia. The Atlas is an ambitious project to build a biodiversity information platform to provide scientists and others with access to information from a wide range of biodiversity data and datasets as well as tools for manipulating, analysing and contributing to that data. Access to literature is particularly important to taxonomic researchers. It does not matter whether the original description of a species was published a year ago or a hundred years ago, the taxonomist must still consult the literature in the process of identifying and naming new species. Prior to digitisation, the library collections housed within each BHL affiliated museum or herbarium library or research institution have existed in isolation, available only to those who can gain physical access. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity. BHL-Au is also member of Biodiversity Heritage Libraries and affiliated projects around the world. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Atlas of Living Australia is a five-year project funded under the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Its mission is to develop a biodiversity data management system which will link Australia’s biological knowledge with its scientific and agricultural reference collections and other custodians of biological information. This system should be: (*) Authoritative - guiding users to the most relevant data resources and well-researched information for each species; (*) Freely accessible - delivering services, tools and content for free use by all; (*) Distributed and federated - integrating existing systems and networks to bring together the most current and complete content. The project aims are: (*) To integrate information on all Australian species, including data on specimens held by Australia’s natural history collections and data from field observations of living organisms; (*) To support the management and integration of biological data from all areas of research (molecular to ecological); (*) To develop search interfaces and web services to facilitate discovery of biological information resources and to support the use of biological data in scientific research, policy-making and education; (*) To ensure that data relating to Australian organisms is well-managed for present needs and organised to meet future information requirements. ... [Information of the supplier]