David Allen
Head
Digital Initiatives Department, Libraries
Kansas State University
Todd A. Chavez
Director of Academic Resources
University of South Florida
Mike Haddock
Chair, Sciences Department, Libraries
Kansas State University
BiodIS: An Institutional Collaboration to Enhance Access to Natural History Collections (Allen & Haddock)
The Biodiversity Information System (BiodIS) at Kansas State University (KSU), is an intra-institutional, interdisciplinary project designed to consolidate and develop the major biodiversity information resources housed at KSU. A defining aim of the project is to develop an Internet portal for exposing information associated with the University’s major natural history collections: the Herbarium and the Museum of Entomological and Prairie Arthropod Research. Combined, these collections contain approximately one million specimens and are particularly noteworthy for historical material collected in the Great Plains region from a time prior to widespread conversion of land via row-crop agriculture. BiodIS is a portal for taxonomic, geographic, and ecological biodiversity data featuring an application for enhanced searching and taxonomy browsing of specimen data along with related tools. BiodIS is a partnership between the Division of Biology, the Department of Entomology, and KSU Libraries, and is supported through a grant from the KSU Office of the Provost. The National Science Foundation, Kansas NSF-EPSCoR, and the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station have provided related funding.
The Evolution of the Karst Information Portal Initiative (Chavez)
Karst is a landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks including limestone, dolomite and gypsum that is crucial to the health and well-being of one out of every four people on Earth. The Karst Information Portal (KIP) is a digital library initiative linking scientists, resource managers, and explorers with quality information resources concerning karst. Begun in 2006 as a partnership between the University of South Florida Libraries, the National Cave & Karst Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Library, and the Union Internationale de Spéléologie (UIS), KIP has expanded to include databases concerning cave minerals, speleothem dating, and coastal cave surveys. This presentation outlines the evolution of the project and describes ongoing developments in the mission to advance information integration and collaborations among karst researchers, a community defined by a globally distributed and highly interdisciplinary knowledge base.