co-funded by the CIP-ICT Policy Support Programme

http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

Opening Up the Natural History Heritage for Europeana

Newsletter1st issue

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ContentContent ............................................. 2Editorial ............................................ 3OpenUp! Project in Nutshell .............. 4Europeana – Think Culture ................... 5OpenUp! Helpdesk ................................ 6Questions and Answers ......................... 6OpenUp! Technical Developments ....... 7Project Meetings ................................... 10OpenUp! Project Website ..................... 11Interview with Project Coordinator ...... 12Project Partners .................................... 14

www.open-up.eu

*)

*) Kionidella moravicensis, fossil bryozoan colony from Kralice nad Oslavou, Miocene age. This neotype is stored in collections of the National Museum, Prague.

Primrose, Primula acaulis, from Sicily. Spe-cimen stored in collections of the Biology Center in Linz (Austria).

3Editorial Welcome to the 1st OpenUp! newsletter. The newsletter will serve as one of the contact points, between the project and all interested stakeholders. It will include all project outco-mes, news about delivered content, and details on the events organized by the project part-ners. The newsletter will be issued every four months.

OpenUp! is a 3-year, EU-funded project un-der the ICT-PSP Programme and runs from March 2011 to February 2014. The primary aim of the project is to make multimedia ob-jects (images, sounds, and videos) from natu-ral history collections available to the public and, with multilingual functionality, link them through Europeana (www.europeana.eu) to a wide European cultural audience.

Currently, Europeana holds primarily multi-media objects from the arts and humanities; scientific content from natural history field is still very limited. Therefore, we initially plan to make available at least 1.1 million high quality images, movies, animal sound files, and natu-ral history artwork. Access will be based on the established technical infrastructure of the Glo-bal Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) including the BioCASE network (Biological Collection Access System for Europe) and the ABCD Schema (Access to Biological Collecti-on Data), a comprehensive XML-based in-terchange format for natural history data.

Dr. Kamil ZágoršekOpenUp! dissemination-work-package leader

4OpenUp! Project in a Nutshell K. Zágoršek (NM)

1 The challengeMultimedia collections stored in  various da-tabases in many natural history museums and botanical gardens around Europe have only very limited possibilities of access. The aim of OpenUp! is to mobilise this multimedia content by using existing networks in the biodiversity research domain and linking these net works to the Europeana portal (www.europeana.eu). This will allow public access to the natural history heritage of Europe for a wide spectrum of European cultu-ral and scientific communities.

2 The projectThe integration of more than one million pictu-res, artwork, movies and audio files into the Europeana environment will substantially enhance its scientific dimension, in particular by addition of natural history specimens to the existing ma-terial from primarily the arts and humanities. Users of Europeana will have direct online access to famous examples of the natural and cultural heritage that are kept in far-flung institutions, of-ten arduous to visit in person.

The presented information will play a substantial educational role and make users of Europeana

aware of important human challenges, such as the climate change or the loss of biodiversity. The provided data may be used by a wide range of scientific applications such as research, educati-on, taxonomic study, biodiversity conservation, protected area management and maintenance of diverse ecosystem services. Another objective of the OpenUp! project is to present to the general public the role and work carried out in natural history institutions beyond what is exposed in ex-hibition rooms.

The procedures set in place to make natu-

ral history multimedia data accessible can serve

as a  proof of concept of the networking and distributed

access mechanisms in the frame-work of Europeana. This concept

can be applied to other communi-ties seeking integration and synthesis of

multimedia data from their respective fields of expertise.

The project OpenUp! is a Best Practice Network, co-funded by the European Commission under the CIP ICT PSP Programme. The project is being implemented by a consortium led by the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, Freie Universität Berlin and includes 23 scientific institutions from 12 different European countries.

The wide public availability of natural history multimedia through Europeana will improve the interoperability of European taxonomic research and promote a wide spectrum of other scientific and educational applications.

Specimen of the Great Spotted Cowrie (Cypraea guttata) deposited in the

Biology center in Linz (Austria).

5Europeana – Think CultureSource from Europeana adapted by J. Frank (NM) and B. Jacob (MRAC)

Europeana is “Europe’s digital library, archive and museum”. It incorporates metadata and content from European cultural and natural history insti-tutions from the domains library, museum, archive as well as audio-visual collection and enables peo-ple to explore those digital resources (images, texts, sounds and videos) via its portal at http : / /europeana.eu/por ta l / .

The Europeana service now gives multilingual access to over 15 mil-lion items from 1.500 of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage orga-nizations.

Europeana was launched in 2008, with the goal of ma-king Europe‘s cultural and scientific heritage acces-sible to the public. The project is funded by the Euro-pean Commission. It is based in the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Work

to enhance Europeana with more functions and features for users was carried out by Europe-ana v1.0, and is conti-nued by its successor Europeana v2.0. This includes major upgrades to the Europeana service to improve user expe-rience. Over 180 heritage and knowledge organisati-ons and IT experts across Europe support Europeana regarding technical and usability issues. Europeana builds on the experience of The European Library, which is a service of the Conference of European Nati-onal Librarians. Overseeing the project is the Europe-ana Foundation. Its members are the presidents and chairs of European associations for cultural heritage and information associations.

Kickvorschen, Maria Sibylla Merian, 1719 Memory of the Netherlands (from Europeana)

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Questions and AnswersJ. Frank (NM) and B. Jacob (MRAC)

OpenUp! HelpdeskB. Jacob and P. Mergen (MRAC)

One of the work packages in the OpenUp! project (WP7) is dedicated to providing assistance to our partners and future content providers in answering their questions and providing technical documentation. Nine partners from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finnland, France, and Germany are members of this work package called “Helpdesk Facility and Extending the Network” organized at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium. To support our work we will set up a helpdesk infrastructure that can be accessed online. While the final release of this OpenUp! helpdesk facility is due to spring of next

year, we have already set up a functional test version athttp://open-up.cybertaxonomy.africamuseum.be/.

There, users can post questions and discuss technical developments in one of the thematic forums or send questions to the dispatching sys-tem at openup.helpdesk@africamuseum.be.

The Q and A section in this newsletter for example, is also represented in the forums, which will also include links to relevant documentation. Additional documentation material produced during the OpenUp! project, will be uploaded to the Helpdesk.

What is GBIF?

What is BioCASE?

When can I see the first OpenUp! objects in Euro-peana?

How many objects will OpenUp! provide to Euro-peana?

What kind of content does OpenUp! provide to Euro-peana?

How many partners and content providers are in the OpenUp! project?

Can I also be a content provider?

GBIF is an international organisation that is working to make the world‘s bi-odiversity data accessible everywhere in the world. For more information visit GBIF (www.gbif.org) and http://bit.ly/OpenUpHelpdesk-GBIF.

The Biological Collection Access Service for Europe, is a transnational network of biological collections of all kinds. OpenUp! partners will use the BioCASE provider software to make content available for Europeana. For more infor-mation visit http://bit.ly/OpenUpHelpdesk-BioCASE.

The first part of the OpenUp! content will be available in Europeana in the 2nd quarter of the year 2012. http://bit.ly/uOKegc

There are currently over 1,061,000 items scheduled for contribution to Europe-ana. http://bit.ly/tFChbJ

High quality object images, natural history artwork, animal sound files, and from the natural history domain. http://bit.ly/tbtECP

23 project partners, including some of the most outstanding natural history museums and botanical gardens in Europe, and almost all will function as con-tent providers. See pages 14-20 herein. http://bit.ly/tLf1vv

OpenUp! welcomes institutions and encourages them to become associated OpenUp! partners, providing content to Europeana and GBIF. For more infor-mation visit http://bit.ly/OpenUpHelpdesk-AssociatedPartners or contact us at openup.helpdesk@africamuseum.be.

7OpenUp! Technical Developments

explained for Non-TechniciansW.G. Berendsohn, A. Güntsch, A.K. Michel, P. Böttinger, and N. Reinecke (BGBM)

The public website Europeana (www.europeana.eu/portal/) aims at building a single cross-domain on--line access point to Europe’s cultural heritage, a Eu-ropean digital library for all – the general public, pro-fessionals, and researchers. It already provides access to more than 15 million digital objects (i.e., images, texts, audio and video files), but although natural history objects are part of the European scientific heritage and thus clearly within the scope of Euro-peana, these are still dramatically underrepresented. OpenUp! will close this gap by channeling multime-dia content from natural history collections into Eu-ropeana, taking advantage of the existing European infrastructure of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, www.gbif.org).

OpenUp! innovatively uses the proven open source technology of BioCASE (Biological Collection Ac-cess Service for Europe, www.biocase.org) and GBIF infrastructures that have been developed for sharing biodiversity data on the web. It builds on established and agreed protocols, services, and data standards already widely used in the natural history domain, such as the BioCASe protocol and ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data) standard, a comprehensi-ve XML-based interchange format for natural history data. The BioCASE provider software is installed on the web server of the data provider. It translates the local data into the ABCD standard and thus allows for querying the databases in the BioCASE and GBIF networks using standardised data items and retrie-ving the results from multiple providers in parallel.

OpenUp! takes advantage of this mechanism to re-gularly harvest all the information in the participa-ting institution’s databases that refer to multimedia objects. Together with a link to the multimedia ob-ject itself, the data are stored in a constantly upda-ted aggregator database. This “metadatabase” can be accessed using the OAI-PMH interface definition (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Har-vesting), which is a standard widely used in the libra-ry domain. Europeana uses the interface to harvest

the metadata and make them available through its web interface. (For a more detailed description of the mobilisation of the natural history content from collection holders to Europeana, please refer to the figure on page 7.)

The innovation lies in the way OpenUp! implements data quality and enrichment measures to achieve a high level of completeness and correctness of me-tadata associated with the multimedia objects. A dedicated Data Quality Toolkit is developed which integrates a number of quality services including comprehensive scientific name catalogues for botany and zoology. It also validates information on taxo-nomy, geography, language, and type of multimedia. The toolkit consults existing OpenUp! provider in-stallations and automatically compiles a report with quality problems found, which can then be tackled at the source. In terms of data enrichment, the pro-ject will incorporate multilingual metadata into the metadatabase, in particular vernacular names of or-ganisms. This will open up the content to a multicul-tural audience. Alternative scientific names (syno-nyms) are also included, so that content can be found even under an outdated organism name.

Setting up the OpenUp! technical infrastructure has progressed as planned, with prototypes of the most important technical components already in place. By the end of year one, the data-holding institutions will provide the first 200,000 objects of their multimedia content to Europeana via the OpenUp! infrastructu-re. Next year every effort will be made to substantially extend the OpenUp! network by equipping new data providers with OpenUp! software (provider software and the data quality toolkit). The aim is to deliver at least 1.1 million multimedia natural history objects to Europeana by the end of the project.

The results of OpenUp! and the procedures set in place to make natural history data digitally acces-sible can serve as proof of concept of the networking and distributed access mechanisms used for Euro-peana content provision. This experience can then

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At the centre of data provision is the local collection database holding records with references to multime-dia objects. The collection databases are managed with local tools that may differ widely between collecti-ons, both with respect to content as to relational database management technology. The local database is accessible by the BioCASE Wrapper, which performs the transformation to ABCD standard XML and thus allows access by standard tools (Harvester and Data Quality Toolkit). The people conducting the Local DB Management interact with the database to introduce corrections revealed by the Data Quality Toolkit. The Data Quality Toolkit software interacts with the BioCASE Wrapper to access the data in the database, and uses services to conduct integrity checks with respect to names and other data integrity rules, the results of which are fed back interactively to the local DB management. It will also include an interface explaining XML errors that are discovered in the course of the harvesting process. At the aggregator level the OpenUp! Harvester will access the local wrappers using the OpenUp! Metadata held and cache the ABCD XML files. Subsequently, these will be transformed to EDM conformant data using the Europeana Mapping and provi-ded by means of an OAI-PMH Service to Europeana.

be extended to other content provider communities with a similar high degree of content distribution. As information about the biodiversity heritage becomes more widely and openly available via the web, it will

play a much greater role in the discussion of pressing global problems such as the loss of biodiversity and the management of natural resources.

Papaver rhoeas (corn poppy) was collected on Sardinia and is stored in the collections of the Biology Center in Linz (Austria).

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10Project Meetings N. Reinecke (BGBM); B. Jacob (MRAC); G. Koch (AIT)

1) OpenUp! Kick-Off Meeting Berlin, 8-11 March 2011

This truly stimulating experience for all 23 project part-ners, was hosted by the project coordinator, the Bota-nical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem,

Freie Universität Berlin. The project partners presented their institutions and the content to be provided for Europeana. The kick-off meeting was combined with Technology Management Group (TMG) and Outreach and Dissemination Group (ODG) meetings and a first workshop on dissemination.

2) BioCASE-WorkshopBerlin, 30-31 May 2011

A first hands-on training on BioCASE and the ABCD schema has been organized by WP7 (Helpdesk Facility and Extending the Network) and the BioCASE Helpdesk. 17 participants from 9 countries met for two very sunny days at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem to learn to set up the BioCASE Provider Software (BPS release 2.6.0) and do test mappings to the ABCD schema (Access to Biological Collections Data). It was a very productive meeting and a good start for advancing the technical infrastructure of the

OpenUp! project on the providers' side. The presentation can be found at:http://biocase.org/files/BioCASe_Workshop_Berlin_2011.ppt

3) ABCD - ESE Mapping Workshop Berlin, 21-22 June 2011

The workshop successfully produced a data mapping of the Europeana standard ESEv3.4 to ABCDv2.06. One of the problems that has been tackled during the seminar was the mapping of data fields that give access to image files. It is mandatory to pro-

© Anja Friedrich

Participants of the OpenUp! kick-Off meeting in Berlin botanical museum (BGBM).

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vide for Europeana not only access to metadata but also to link to digital objects (texts, images, videos, sounds) connected to the metadata. The-refore, where only raw images are available a new BioCASE wrapper configuration will be created

that provides access to UnitIDs and the URLs pointing to the images for Thumbnail creation. This solution is now being tested on the data of the herbarium database of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem.

OpenUp! Website K. Zágoršek, J. Frank (NM)

The OpenUp! project website (www.open-up.eu), was established to promote the project itself, to publish the project’s work, to bring together all information about the progress and to give access to all project documents. The additional aims of the project website are to provide a com-munication tool for project management and addressing end users, especially:

• project partners • broad public with interest in biodiversity• scientific institutions (especially in Europe),

universities, museums, and botanical gardens

The OpenUp! project website consists of two partly conjunct areas: the public area with an

interlink to the OpenUp! Helpdesk and a rest-ricted internal area. The public and restricted internal areas are administrated by the Natio-nal Museum in Prague, whereas the Helpdesk itself is administrated by the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. The public audience is addressed by blogs, documents, presentations, a regular newsletter, and content highlights on the website. All documents as such as press re-lease, presentations, as well as other promotion materials can be downloaded for free and act as a source of information about the project.

The site uses “Scratchpad”, an adaptation of the Drupal content management system hosted at the Natural History Museum in London.

Participants of the BioCASE training at the botanical garden in Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM).

12Interview with the Project Coordinator Prof. Dr. Walter Berendsohn

Dr Walter Berendsohn explains how the work of his latest project fits in with the existing Europeana portal and highlights how it will benefit the natural his-tory domain and pro-motion of biodiversity.

Could you begin by explaining the work being done at Europeana and how OpenUp! contributes to Europeana’s goals?Europeana aims at building a single crossdomain online access point to Europe’s cultural heritage, a European digital library for all: researchers, profes-sionals and the public (www.europeana.eu/portal). It already provides access to more than 15 million digital objects but, although natural history objects are part of the European scientific heritage and thus clearly within the scope of Europeana, these are still dramatically underrepresented. OpenUp! will close this gap by channelling multimedia content from natural history collections into Europeana, taking advantage of the existing European infrastructu-re in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

What threats or challenges do global biodiversity and natural history face and how does this project seek to address them? Biodiversity was the focus of interest of the Earth Summit of Rio 1992, where 150 states signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the term ‘biodiversity’ gained political meaning. The CBD formulated its main aims in Article 1 of its conditions as: ‘Conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources’. OpenUp! is pro-viding enhanced access to the natural history ob-jects that have been collected on the territories of Europe’s former colonies and that were preserved by European institutions over the past three centu-ries. This amounts to sharing the very information

on which the knowledge about the living world is based. Moreover, many of the objects are unique and from places which no longer exist and thus can-not be collected again. It thus helps to develop local research capacities and provide knowledge about the past and present biodiversity, eg. in tropical re-gions of the World, and tries to estimate possible development of biodiversity in the future.

How will OpenUp! help to promote awareness of con-temporary issues such as climate change and biodi-versity loss to the general users of Europeana?You can only protect the things that you are aware of! European natural history collections cover most of the species described worldwide, ranging from common and famous species to those that have already become extinct. OpenUp! will greatly enhance the opportunity of data discovery within Europeana and beyond by providing additional me-tadata such as the scientifi c names used for the or-ganisms, locality where the specimen was collected, and time of collection. The cultural value of collecti-ons in historical expeditions may further enhance the interest of the public for the natural world and in many cases, OpenUp! for Europeana will make these treasures available to the general public for the fi rst time.

What are some of the technical challenges associated with making a large number of multimedia objects from such a wide range of institutions available on the Internet?A large number of data provider services, a set of services mainly supporting data quality measures, and a central aggregation facility are needed for a seamless integration of natural history content into the Europeana infrastructure. OpenUp! tackles the-se requirements by innovatively applying proven open source technologies that have been developed for sharing biodiversity data on the web. By rely-ing on these widely accepted web infrastructures, the consistent provision of natural history content into the Europeana infrastructure is ensured – even after this project ends. Nevertheless, technical chal-lenges exist, such as establishing data quality ser-vices and standards in further content areas, such

adopted from ‘International Innovation – Environment‘, October 2011, p. 78-80

Pyromorphite - green pyromorphite crystals on weathered gangue, Příbram, Czech Republic. Specimen stored at the National Museum, Prague.

as geography, language and types of multimedia.

Can you shed light on how the project might serve as a prototype to shape the future of biodiversity heritage? Natural history collections form one of the key com-ponents of Europe’s biodiversity heritage, relevant for the entire world. Collections form a highly distribu-ted information resource, so that innovative and effi cient measures for networking multimedia objects and handling their associated metadata are needed. The results of this project and the procedures set in

place to make natural history data digitally accessible can serve as proof of the concept of networking and distributed access mechanisms. This experience can then be extended to other content provider commu-nities with a similarly high degree of content distribu-tion. As information about the biodiversity heritage becomes more widely and openly available via the web, it will play a much greater role in the discussion of pressing global problems such as the loss of biodi-versity and the management of natural resources.

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14Project Partners

Freie Universität Berlin, Botanic Garden and Botani-cal Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM)The Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM)

of the Freie Universität Berlin is a centre of biodiver-sity research in Europe, housing extensive scientific collections of herbarium specimens (about 3.5 mil-lion), one of the world’s largest living plants collecti-ons, as well as the most complete botanical library in Germany. BGBM recognised early the new role of natural history museums in the domain of electronic information. Today, the BGBM has a separate de-partment of Biodiversity Informatics with at present more than 20 staff members (computer scientists, botanists, zoologists, engineers, mathematicians, and technicians). Focal point of R&D activities are taxo-nomic information systems and networking of distri-buted primary biodiversity information. The BGBM hosts numerous databases and information systems and is connected with a Gigabit backbone and Giga-bit connection to the GÉANT network via GWIN.

The Natural History Museum, London (NHM)The Natural History Muse-

um is one of the world’s great museums, with over 4.2 million visitors, and 13 million online visitors per year. The NHM is also an international leader in the scientific study of the natural world. NHM has a strong track-record in EC funded research and training. It currently leads two EU Infrastructure Programmes projects; namely SYNTHESYS, which provides physical and virtual access and training in 20 natural history museums and herbaria and ViBRANT, which is virtual infrastructure suppor-ting the mobilisation, sharing, reuse and publicati-on of biodiversity data. NHM is leading a further 11 FPVII projects across a range of research dis-ciplines. The NHM library has the largest collecti-on of natural history materials in the world, with over 1,000,000 books (from 1469 onwards), 25,000 journal titles, and 600,000 works of art. The NHM is a leading participant in the Biodiversity Heritage Library BHL/ BHL-Europe and an active player in

the Encyclopaedia of Life Project. NHM has a large number of staff members with good background in Library Management Systems and strong IT skills including programming and database creation.

Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Re-search on Evolution and Bi-odiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin (MfN)The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

(MfN) is one of the world leading natural science museums, devoted to basic research and education in all fields of natural history, with a focus on biodiver-sity, biological evolution, and basic earth sciences. Its vast zoological, palaeontological and mineralogical collections comprise over 30 million scientific sam-ples and more than 170,000 primary type specimens from all major regions and ecosystems of the World. Facilities at the MfN include several general and high-end laboratories (SEM, isotope analysis, DNA sequencing, 3D-CAD/visualization, micro CT), a large scientific library (>175,000 titles, >1,000 jour-nals), and a recently upgraded ITC-infrastructure. Since 2009, the MfN is constituted as an independent Foundation under the Leibniz Association supported in equal shares by the State of Berlin and the German Federal Government. The institute, which remains affiliated to the Humboldt University in Berlin cur-rently employs about 230 staff, including 70 scien-tists. Its exhibitions (ca 7,100 square meters) are seen by more than 500,000 visitors annually. The MfN co-ordinates the eContentPlus project BHL-Europe.

Institute of Botany, Slovak Academy of Sciences (IBSAS)The Institute of Botany SAS is the largest taxonomic research cen-tre for the taxonomy of vascu-

lar and non-vascular plants in the Slovak Republic. The institute houses the Slovak Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node and Global Ta-xonomy Initiative (GTI) national focal point. The Institute participated or still participates as a part-ner institution in several EU-supported projects: Euro+Med PlantBase, ENBI, BioCASE, Intrabio-div, ENSCONET, EDIT and PESI. The institute has leading role in national projects such as the mul-

tivolume Flora of Slovakia (Flóra Slovenska), the Checklist of non-vascular and vascular plants of Slovakia (with updates), and the Red lists of non--vascular and vascular plants of Slovakia. The In-stitute has also recently established laboratories of flow cytometry and molecular systematics, which enable to apply most advanced methods in studies of the evolution of vascular plants and the pheno-menon of polyploidy. The Institute houses also one of the largest herbaria in Slovakia, documenting di-versity of vascular and non-vascular plants in Slova-kia and adjacent regions. The herbarium comprises also several special collections as that of František Nábělek‘s Iter Turcico-Persicum collected during 1909-1910 in the area of present Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, and Iraq with a considerable number of type specimens, or that of Alois Zlatník, docu-menting the wide diversity of the genera Hieraci-um and Pilosella throughout Central Europe, again with numerous type specimens.

Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (NHMW)

The Natural History Museum in Vienna was foun-ded more than 250 years ago. The museum includes departments for Anthropology, Botany, Geology, Mineralogy, Karst and Caves, Palaeontology, and Zoology. Most departments are organised in “col-lections” for special taxonomic units with respon-sible scientific curators. The collections with more than 30 million specimens including hundreds of thousands of nomenclatural type specimens are a fundamental basis for any taxonomic work, as well as general aspects on biodiversity and ecological questions.

Musée Royal de l‘Afrique Centrale (MRAC)The Musée Royal de l‘Afrique Centrale (MRAC) is a multidis-

ciplinary institution with a special focus on Sub--Saharan Africa. It is a leading research institute and knowledge centre on the biodiversity and cul-tural heritage in Africa, particularly Central Afri-ca, and aims to develop interest and understanding for African fauna, flora and cultural heritage in the scientific communities and the public at large. It manages collections of about 10 million specimens

of animals and 60,000 wood specimens of 13,600 different botanical species. Researchers carry out studies both in the natural and urban environ-ments, including on socio-economical impacts, aimed at gaining insight into biodiversity and to stimulate interest among the general public and the scientific community. The MRAC maintains an extensive library, including the top scientific journals, but also a unique collection of rare, old colonial publications. Scientific staff master ten languages; consequently, the library and reprint documentation is unusually multilingual. The in-stitution is keeping more or less 1.2 km of Archi-ves of unique interest, more than 200,000 cultural objects, more than one million of photographic ar-chives, 700 movies and more than 6,000 hours of traditional music and voice recordings.

Národní muzeum, Praha (NM)The National Museum is the largest museum in the Czech Republic and a leader in science, PR and database technologies among other public

cultural and scientific institutions. The collections, which are systematically extended and enriched, consist of almost 20 million items from the area of natural history, history, archaeology, arts, music, and librarianship from all over the world, with a particular focus on the Czech Republic. The most important are collections of mineralogy, paleon-tology, botany, entomology, zoology, and archa-eology. The National Museum conducts research in various fields of natural and historical sciences and has a large exhibit activity. The collections and exhibitions are located in more than 15 public museums and exhibition halls all over the country. The museum publishes 12 scientific journals and numerous other non periodical publications.

Stichting Expertisecentrum voor Taxonomische Identificatie, Amsterdam (ETI)

ETI BioInformatics provides services to facilitate worldwide access to quality taxonomic and biodi-versity information for scientific, educational, and awareness purposes. ETI is a not-for-profit project-

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-fund-driven organization. It is Associate Partici-pant in GBIF. ETI is organized in two sections: The Informatics Unit designs, develops, implements and hosts ICT services and solutions to support the ac-cessibility and interoperability of digital informati-on. The Information Unit works with a global ne-twork of partners to harvest and compile taxonomic expertise to create and e-publish quality biodiversity information services. Over the past 20 years more than 100 CD-ROMS and DVDs have been produ-ced and a vast amount of taxonomic multimedia objects have been created including nearly 100,000 drawings, artwork, sound files, and movies.

Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig (ZFMK)

The “Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig” (ZFMK), founded as a private research and exhibition institute by Alexander Koenig (1858-1940), is one of the major natural history research museums in the Federal Republic of Germany, (www.zfmk.de). As a member of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (WGL), the ZFMK is jointly funded by the state of Northrhine-Westphalia, the other states of Germany and the federal government. Today, ZFMK employs 57 staff, including 15 scientists. The ZFMK scienti-fic collections comprise an estimated 350,000 spe-cimens of vertebrates (ca 80,000 mammals; 136,700 birds; ca 40,000 fishes; more than 77,000 reptiles and amphibians) and several million specimens of insects (1.35 M. butterflies, 1.9 M. beetles, 300,000 flies, and further specimens belonging to other insect groups). The library comprises an estimated 150,000 accessi-ons of which more than 90% are already digitized. The digitization of the scientific collections at the species as well as at the specimen level is in progress.

Royal Belgian Insti-tute of Natural Sci-ences (RBINS)

The RBINS is the third largest European natural his-tory museum. Its three missions are (1) research, (2) curation and management of collections, and (3) providing scientific expertise, services and public education in particular through permanent and tem-porary exhibits, conferences etc. The RBINS houses a diverse and exceptionally rich zoological collection,

palaeoanthropology, prehistoric items and a diverse mineral collection. The total is in the order of 37 mil-lion specimens with around 100,000 primary types. This places RBINS among the world top ten collecti-ons in terms of volume of specimen stored and avai-lable for research. The scientific library of the RBINS offers a vast range of books and magazines (695,368 volumes/7,000 periodicals). Taxonomic expertise is present for many groups of invertebrates and ver-tebrates worldwide, and in all sorts of ecosystems, i.e. terrestrial, freshwater, and marine. The RBINS is a partner in numerous European biodiversity-related initiatives such as CETAF, ENBI, SciColl, ECOOP, SYNTHESYS, EDIT, BHL-Europe.

Secretariat of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)The Global Biodiversity Informati-on Facility (GBIF) is an inter-go-

vernmental organisation, originally initiated through the OECD but now open to any country or body that establishes a memorandum of understanding with GBIF and complies with its conditions, in particular, to make biodiversity data available. The mission of GBIF is to facilitate free and open access to biodiver-sity data worldwide via the Internet to underpin sus-tainable development. Priorities, with an emphasis on promoting participation and working through partners, include mobilising biodiversity data, deve-loping protocols and standards to ensure scientific integrity and interoperability, building an informa-tics architecture to allow the interlinking of diverse data types from disparate sources, promoting capaci-ty building and catalysing development of analytical tools for improved decision-making.

University of Copenhagen, Natural History Museum of Denmark (UCPH)The Natural History Museum of Denmark is an institute of the Uni-versity and holds the largest Danish

natural history collections. Part of the collections has been digitized with images, and a newly acqui-red grant is speeding up the digitisation process drastically. The Danish GBIF node, DanBIF, is lo-cated in the museum and will take an active part in the work.

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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE)

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is an inter-nationally renowned centre for botanical research and conservation which was founded in 1670. It has a herbarium of 3 million specimens, one of the lar-gest collection of living plants of wild origin in the world, an important botanical library and archives and a staff of over 30 research scientists. The her-barium has strong representation of European spe-cimens and is one of the best herbaria in the world for the area from the eastern Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan. The cultural importance of herbarium specimens and botanical art is a theme of research at the garden, building on the rich archive and her-barium. Digitisation is an important strategy and significant funds have been provided by the Scottish Government to develop mechanisms for speeding up high quality digitisation. The garden has a strong bioinformatics team which is working on ways of delivering biodiversity data to a wide range of end users. RBGE also has a strong standing in the area of biodiversity informatics and biodiversity informati-on systems.

AIT Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesells-chaft mbH (AIT)

AIT is an Austrian software and research company founded in 1979. Research work is done primarily in the field of information management (e.g. distribu-ted databases, collection management and knowled-ge engineering). It is carried out within the EC (e.g. IST, Ten-Telecom etc.) action lines or on national and regional level. Research projects that AIT co-operated with or co-ordinated include: MOSAIC (Museums Over States and virtual Culture; TEN--Telecom), COVAX (Contemporary Culture Vir-tual Archives in XML; IST-Programme), REGNET (Cultural Heritage in REGional NETworks), Media.Alp (Setting up an integrated communication plat-form for achieving a cultural community in the Al-pine space; Interreg Alpine Space Programme), and DISMARC (DIScovering Music ARChives; eCon-tentPlus). Within DISMARC, OAI technology and protocols are used to create a common metadata ca-talogue of distributed archives. The DISMARC mul-

tilingual metadata platform is currently continued via the participation in EuropeanaConnect 2009-2011 and AIT brings in its experience in multilin-gual portal development in the BHL Europe Project (Biodiversity Heritage Library Europe) 2009-2012 (both ICT PSP). AIT is furthermore the Austrian content coordinator for the digital library project EuropeanaLocal 2008-2011, where a virtual content aggregation platform for museums, archives, libra-ries and other content institutions is being created based on OAI technology and international stan-dards (Dublin Core). Further research work focuses on the provision of Web services for the cultural he-ritage domain, which are based on the SKOS voca-bulary. First implementations concern the provisi-on of vocabulary Web services as support process to the primary procedure “Cataloguing” (implemen-ted standards: ANSI/NISO Z39.19, ISO 2788:1986, ISO-5964).

University of Helsinki, Finnish Museum of Natural History (UH)The Finnish Museum of Natural History is a national

institution operating under the auspices of the University of Helsinki. The museum has 130 staff, 7 M€ annual budget, and it houses the national biological collections. The museum is the largest custodian of biological survey data in Finland, and its data holdings cover over 20 million digital primary biodiversity records, and 15 million un-digitised specimens. The museum group hosts several data collection portals for citizen networks. The Biodiversity Informatics Unit of the museum, which coordinates the GBIF node in the country, participates in this project. The Unit is responsible for digitisation of collections and operates an annual budget of 500,000 € for that purpose. In a major project in 2009 the most important historical accession books of the Zoological Museum were digitized and interpreted to structural form by remote workers. This work was done as part of the activities of the National Digital Library of Finland, and through this cooperation with the cultural heritage programmes content of the museum feeds already to Europeana. The Unit also manages taxonomic records of the country and is leading the cooperation of Nordic GBIF nodes on the Nordic taxonomic e-infrastructure.

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The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (RBGK)The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is fundamentally a scientific, amenity and edu-

cational organisation devoted to increasing knowled-ge and public understanding of plant and fungal di-versity. Throughout its history, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has made important contributions to increasing the understanding of the plant kingdom and today is still first and foremost a scientific insti-tution. Among its most important recent research achievements has been to lead a worldwide team to map the phylogeny of higher plants down to family level. The Kew Herbarium is one of the most com-prehensive in the world, with a reference collection of around 8 million plant and fungal specimens. The Millennium Seed Bank is a rapidly growing collecti-on of seed of wild species from semi-arid and arid environments world-wide and aims eventually to conserve ex situ approximately 10% of the world’s flo-ra on behalf of a worldwide collaborative network of national government organizations. The Library has more than 750,000 volumes, representing a globally important reference source for botanical research.

Stichting Nationaal Centrum voor Bio-diversiteit Naturalis (National Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis) (NCBN)

NCB Naturalis is the national museum of natural history of the Netherlands, housed in a modern new building in the city of Leiden, which was opened to the public in 1998. The museum was founded in 1820 and much of its collections date back to the 19th and 20th century. NCB Naturalis has a staff of about 160 people (124 fte), which include scientists, collection managers, exhibition designers, information officers, educators, etc. as well as a large number of associate researchers and volunteers. It has three main depart-ments: public engagement, collections and research. The collections of zoological, paleontological and geo-logical objects are estimated about 12 million objects. NCB Naturalis is merging with State Herbarium and the Zoological Museum of the University of Amster-dam. Staff will amount approx. 200 fte, total col-lection 35 million objects. See: www.ncbnaturalis.nl

National Botanic Gar-den of Belgium (NBGB)The Herbarium of the Natio-nal Botanic Garden of Belgium contains about 3 million speci-mens from all over the world,

among which are about 50,000 nomenclatural types. Consequently, it plays an important role in the con-servation of the scientific world heritage that is kept in the European herbaria and musea. Our collections exist of Spermatophytes, Pteridophytes, Bryophytes, Algae, Fungi, Myxomycetes, and Lichens. The col-lections are divided in three main geographical areas: the African, Belgian, and General Collections. The department S.P. conserves one of the 25 largest col-lections of herbarium specimens in the world (more than 2.5 million specimens). This conservation com-prises numerous specimens collected in Belgium (more than 300,000 specimens) and historical ma-terial from the time that Belgium was interested in the exploration of the New World (e.g. the Mexican collections made by Galeotti, the collection assem-bled in Venezuela by Funck and Schlim, and the fa-mous Herbarium Martii). In 2007, the importance of the collection was raised by the permanent loan of the ca. 300,000 historical vascular plant specimens of the Van Heurck Museum (AWH). The ‘Herbari-um Africanum’ contains about 95% of all the her-barium specimens collected in central Africa (R.D. Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi). It contains also the Herbarium of the Africa Museum (Tervuren), which was already transferred to the National Botanic Gar-den in the 1930’s. The ‘Herbarium Generale’ aims at worldwide coverage, allowing to find primary infor-mation on the earth’s floras in the National Botanic Garden.

Muséum National d‘Histoire Naturelle (MNHN)The Muséum National d‘Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) is one of the world’s major natural history in-stitutions and contributes to the

knowledge and conservation of biodiversity through research dedicated to the study of biodiversity, evolu-tion and the relation between man and nature, higher education and training, conservation of priceless refe-rence collections, outreach activities in world famous museums, botanical and zoological gardens and pro-

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19viding expertise to the government for environmental policies. The Muséum is a public institution under the dual supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Ecology and Sus-tainable Development. Today MNHN employs 1,880 staff, including 500 researchers; MNHN has 7 scien-tific research departments (350 students, master’s and PhD, 3 scientific dissemination departments, 4 cross--cutting directions. The collections hold 68 million specimens, the museum has over 2 million paying vi-sitors a year.

University of Tartu, Natural History Mu-seum (UT-NHM)The University of Tartu was founded in 1632 by the Swedish king Gustavus Adol-phus. It was initially called

Academia Dorpatensis. The necessary preparati-ons for creating a university in Tartu (then Dor-pat) were made by Johan Skytte, governor general of Livonia. Academia Dorpatensis, modelled after the University of Uppsala in Sweden, was inten-ded to pursue research and advance learning in a wide variety of disciplines. The University of Tar-tu (UT) has continued to adhere to this approach throughout the centuries, and remains today the only classical university in Estonia. Research at UT focuses on subjects as diverse as medicine and philosophy, genetics and computer science. UT is Estonia’s leading centre of research and training. It preserves the culture of the Estonian people and spearheads the country’s reputation in research and provision of higher education. As Estonia’s national university, UT stresses the importance of international co-operation and partnerships with reputable research universities all over the world. The robust research potential of the university is evidenced by the fact that it is the only Baltic uni-versity that has been invited to join the Coimbra Group, a prestigious club of renowned research universities. UT includes nine faculties, five col-leges and several regional development units, of which the latter two are situated in different parts of Estonia. To support and develop the professio-nal competence of its students and academic staff, the university has entered into bilateral co-ope-ration agreements with 48 partner institutions in 19 countries. The Museum of Natural History of

the University of Tartu (UT-NHM), responsible for this project, was established in 1802. In 2005, the museum operates under the umbrella of the in-stitution of UT Museums. One of the priorities of the Museum of Natural History is participating in the national co-operation network for developing the national biodiversity data base, integrating the museum collections and field studies. The backbo-ne of this relational data base is hosted by UT.

Species 2000, Read-ing, United Kingdom (Sp2000)

Species 2000 is an International Network organi-sation that creates an index of the world’s known organisms. It is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee registered in England (Company No. 3479405) and registered as an SME with the Eu-ropean Commission. The Species 2000 distributed model synthesises the index from sectors supplied by taxonomic databases across Europe and around the world, many from the major European insti-tutions of CETAF. The programme reached pro-duction scale as an EC scientific infrastructure under the FP5 EuroCat project, and as a member of EDIT celebrated coverage of one million species in 2007.

Society for the Manage-ment of Electronic Biodi-versity Data (SMEBD)The Society for the Management of Electronic Biodiversity Data

(SMEBD) makes scientifically authoritative biodiver-sity e-data publicly available for the benefit of science, environmental management and the general public (www.smebd.eu). SMEBD was established to own the intellectual property arising from the creation of the European Register of Marine Species (ERMS). This no-vel approach to biodiversity e-data management had several benefits, including the shared ownership, which also triggered a continued interest of the contributors in maintaining their data quality and expanding their content. It also efficients and controls the authorisati-on of data governance (data editing and validation) and further disseminations. It was anticipated that this func-tion may prove useful for other biodiversity databases, and indeed, Fauna Europaea similarly became part of SMEBD.

20Land Oberösterreich - Oberösterreichis-che Landesmuseen / Biologiezentrum (LANDOOE)

The Biology Centre in Linz-Dornach, with its more than 15 million objects, represents the largest natural history collection in the province of Upper Austria and is the second largest in Austria, next to the Na-tural History Museum in Vienna. The Biology Cen-tre maintains the natural-science collections of the Upper Austrian Provincial Museums. Additionally, the publication series Stapfia and Denisia and three

journals (Linzer biologische Beiträge, Beiträge zur Naturkunde Oberösterreichs and Vogelkundliche Nachrichten - Naturschutz aktuell) are currently published. Our museum holds the biodiversity data-base ZOBODAT, which was founded in 1972 as ZO-ODAT. The database today includes more then 3.3 million records (approx. 38,000 species and 82,000 pictures) on the distribution of animals and plants mainly from Austria but holds at least one record from 180 different countries. Furthermore we have included literature citations (more than 35,000), OCR scanned books (approx. 500,000 pages) and bibliographies from about 9,000 biologists until now.

Holotype of fossil regu-lar echinoid Novasalenia predbojensis, Cenoma-nian, Upper Cretaceous. This specimen comes from abandoned and filled-in quarry near Prague.

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Fossil colony of bryozoan Smittina cervicornis from Miocene sediment near Podbřežice, Czech Republic. This, as well as the specimen on the oposite page are stored in the collections of the National Museum, Prague.

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OpenUp! Newsletter

Editorial team: Kamil Zágoršek (National Museum, Pra-gue), Jiří Frank (National Museum, Prague), Jan Sklenář (National Museum, Prague).

This communication tool is issued by OpenUp! at the National Museum, Václavské náměstí 68, 115 79 Praha 2, Czech Republic.

All natural objects figured in the newsletter come from collections of the OpenUp! content providers and will be displayed on the Europeana portal.