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The Biodiversity Collections Index was warmly received when it was presented at the annual TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) meeting held this year in Fremantle, Western Australia.
The presentation, by Roger Hyam, is available on-line as a Power Point presentation or as a flash movie with audio.

The switch has been thrown to move the BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org website from its development phase to a fully working beta version. Invitations have been sent to all those who have registered interest inviting them to start using the full index. Users are able to search, register, login, edit records and create new collections. The BCI web services are also available in their beta versions.

The BCI Kick-Off meeting (held on the 28-29 January at NMNH in Washington DC) proved productive start to the project. The first morning consisted of presentations on collections metadata from different perspectives. The afternoon was spent brainstorming the desired functionality of the system before prioritizing top features for implementation over the next six months. The morning of the second day was spent refining this list and discussing technicalities. Minutes of the meeting were compiled directly to the wiki pages and can be read here. The BCI logo was also sighted for the first time at the Kick-Off meeting.

A meeting of interested parties will be held to Kick-Off the project on 28-29 January 2008 at the NMNH in Washington. Participants will include representatives from GBIF, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, NMNH, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Index Herbariorum, Encyclopedia of Life, Consortium for the Barcode of Life and others.

Further details of the meeting are available on the meeting wiki page.

If you have issues you think should be raised at the meeting please contact us through the Register Interest page.

A Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), GBIF and TDWG on Wednesday 5th December 2007. Mary Gibby (pictured above with Roger Hyam, Martin Pullan and Mark Watson) signed for RBGE, Nick King signed for GBIF (pictured to the right of Vishwas Chavan and Hugo von Linstow) and Walter Berendsohn for TDWG. The MoC states that the three organisations will cooperate in building the Biodiversity Collections Index and making it a success. At the same time a contract was signed between GBIF and RBGE for the first years development work. This contract states that the first version of the system will be live by June 2008.