ViTaL

I spent most of last week at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin, where many of the EDIT developers are based.

While is was there I met up with Chris Freeland of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, who gave a talk to Museum staff about the BHL project.

ViTaL will be using the BHL catalogue as one of its data sources, so we are always keen to know about new developments. Chris has just released a suite of name services for BHL, which give programmatic access to the index of species names which have been harvested from the documents in the repository. This data has been searchable via a web browser for a while, but now other web applications can query the database and make use of the results, which opens up a number of new possibilities.

Project Co-ordinator Malte Ebach and I met with Jiri Kende of the Berlin Free University Library where we discussed our plans for ViTaL and how best to progress the work required to make the various relevant sub-libraries searchable through ViTaL.

Thomas Dürbye kindly gave me an impromptu tour of the Botanical Garden's Seedbank, and also showed me some remarkable specimens of Welwitschia mirabilis, which have been growing under glass at the Botanic Garden for over sixty years.

My visit also coincided with the departure of Malte Ebach, paleontologist and biogeographer, and most recently tower of organisational strength of the EDIT project. He is moving on to take up a post at the University of Arizona which will allow him to get back to doing his scientific work. We all wish him luck in the new role.