Users of BioLink -- feedback?

[Barry Roth]

On 5 January I asked on Taxacom whether anyone would care to give feedback on their experience with BioLink information management software from CSIRO.  Only one person has responded.  I excerpt his comments here for the interest of others on the list.  This person does not use BioLink as his main database software, but has purchased it and evaluated it against his own existing system.
"One of the critical missing links in BioLink for me is the ability to associate a reference (literature citation, museum visit, someone's data base that I've imported, etc.) with a specimen label record.  I often am asked what is the source of a record for a taxon?  My records ... come from a wide variety of sources.  In some instances, the same specimen label data may be "cited" in more than one "reference", i.e., a specimen in a museum that was visited, one or more literature records, in another database ....  I find this feature invaluable and hate to lose the association of this information."

"Also, I have yet to discover if customized fields are available to the user.  Biota has a limited number of fields that could be customized, but not enough to accomplish adding the extra info I wanted to include. For example, ... the conservation status of each taxon based on various local, state, and federal resource agencies, conservation groups, etc.  Depending upon the taxon, it may have one to many conservation statuses depending upon who tracks it."

"If you are familiar with the USGS GNIS, then you'll find that the eGaz of BioLink uses a somewhat abbreviated format in its picklist for selecting localities that I would have some difficulty with.  ... Unfortunately, the eGaz displays only the first 15 characters of a locality, so I'd never see the sublocality info in the picklist when trying to geocode.  I really like the mapping module in BioLink."

"Despite these limitations, I am very impressed with the program's overall taxonomic and specimen-level approach for info management."

I remain interested, if anyone else cares to share their impressions or experiences with BioLink.

Barry Roth



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