PowerBooks, FileMaker Pro & Biodiversity research

[Joris Komen]

Hi!

Derek & Piotr wrote
<SNIP>

>Thanks to
>the ease of use of FileMaker and the Mac OS, the Department of Ecology
>and Evolutionary Biology was able to quickly and inexpensively create a
>Web site with databases of their biological collections (birds, mammals,
>fish, insects, fossils, parasites, and plants). Check it out at
>http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/collections/chp.html.
>
<SNIP>

I simply couldn't resist responding to this:-), having lurked the list for
about 48 hours:-)

Thanks to the sheer simplicity and elegance of a Mac/FMPro combination, the
National Museum of Namibia is presently the *only* museum in Africa which
has searcheable webtop collection inventory databases, and more are growing
every day.:-)  Although we would dearly like to upgrade our equipment to
G3:-), thirdworld economics prevent this happening, but our antiquated Mac
workgroup server (6150/66) is performing extremely well, considering the
circumstances!:-)

At present we have inventories of type specimens, bird specimens and
bird/mammal tissue (DNA) online (cumulatively about 12,000 specimen
records), as well as a Namibia (collecting) locality gazetteer (some 11 000
localities) online.  We expect to have other key faunistic databases (and
national checklists) online within the next few weeks, providing we don't
run out of RAM:-).

The databases of National Museum of Namibia can be accessed via

http://www.natmus.cul.na/newindex.html

Cheers

Joris Komen
Curator of Birds/IT manager