ViTaL

ViTaL is part of the EDIT project, which is creating a European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy. EDIT’s goal is to create a network supporting taxonomy for biodiversity and ecosystem research.

EDIT is creating tools and forging links between institutions throughout Europe and beyond which will help reduce many of the impediments currently affecting biological taxonomic work.

ViTaL's part in this is to aid the discovery and accessibility of taxonomically relevant literature through the provision of four main services:

1. ViTaL’s metasearch component will allow searching across a targeted set of taxonomic resources, including library catalogues, databases and e-journals.
2. ViTaL will make available an OpenURL resolver, allowing users to click through their search results to full text content where this is available (through resources such as e-journals or repositories like the Biodiversity Heritage Library), or otherwise to a set of links providing search functions.
3. ViTaL will include a bibliographic reference aggregator, which will harvest references from a range of sources and to provide a centralised bibliographic resource.
4. ViTal will also provide a facility which will enable users of taxonomic literature to nominate suitable materials for digitization. These requests will be available to users of the site and also to members of digitisation projects, allowing them to make use of this information in the prioritisation and planning of scanning schedules.

The components making up ViTaL are currently under development at the Natural History Museum, London. ViTaL is being developed by staff at the Museum in consultation with the EDIT applications development team based in Berlin.