ViTaL

I'm pleased to be able to start posting to this new site where I and my fellow team members will be writing about ViTaL, the Virtual Taxonomic Library.

ViTaL is part of the EDIT project, which is creating the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy.

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 work is to aid the discovery of taxonomically relevant literature. To do this we are creating a meta-searching service which will allow taxonomists to access the library catalogues of the EDIT partner institutions (and others). We will also be providing an OpenURL resolution service to provide links through to the original texts where this is possible.

In addition to the literature searching and linking functions, we will be creating a bibliographic reference aggregator which we hope will grow into a useful resource for researchers, librarians and the publishers of taxonomic information.

The project is at a relatively early stage. As we move through the process of getting ViTaL up and running will be blogging our progress here. We welcome any comments, questions and feedback you may have about the project.