Natural History Advisory Group
This group advised on joint
activities of various
natural history museums, botanical gardens, and herbaria in the RLG
membership. It primarily focused on information management and access.
The group identified crucial community issues, suggested projects, and
solicited funding.
The first meeting was held in New York in June of 2003,
among the founding members: the American Museum of Natural History
(AMNH), the Natural History Museum London (NHM), the New York Botanical
Garden (NYBG), and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
(NMNH).
The Natural History Advisory Group identified
three
key areas of interest:
- The biodiversity commons:
The concept of a shared repository—a zone of fair use for the
knowledge domain of natural history—has been widely
discussed. The commons is a strategy for providing broad access to
knowledge (in the form of journal publications, for example) for
research, education, and conservation uses. The steering committee
planed
to engage in projects to turn the commons from concept into reality.
- Collection description:
Collection-level descriptions provide access to institutional holdings
at an aggregate rather than an item level. For typically vast natural
history collections, this strategy provides an expedient way of
describing collections. When collated from multiple institutions, these
descriptions will be a primary resource discovery tool for natural
history researchers. A separate working group, Resources
Available in the
Natural Sciences, has been assembled to tackle this goal.
- Taxonomic literature in XML schema:
Marking up taxonomic literature with an XML schema will make digitized
texts much more searchable and accessible. A joint project between NHM
and NMNH has generated a candidate schema.
Participants
John Flanagan
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Tom Garnett
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Graham Higley, Chair
Natural History Museum (London)
Tom Moritz
American Museum of Natural History
Heather Rolen
New York Botanical Garden
Hans-Dieter Sues
National Museum of Natural History
(USA)
RLG staff liaison:
Günter Waibel
Program Officer
guenter.waibel@oclc.org
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