[Taxacom] Global Registry of Biological Repositories is now online

[Schindel, David]

Dear Colleagues,

The new Global Registry of Biological Repositories (GRBio) is now live and online at www.grbio.org, offering the community a single, integrated and comprehensive information resource on taxonomic collections. GRBio is a merger of Index Herbariorum (IH), Biodiversity Collections Index (BCI) and biorepositories.org and contains more than 14,000 records for biorepository institutions, their collections, and staff members.  All the data, web services and capabilities that were offered by these three database portals have been incorporated into GRBio.  The Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) has developed and will manage GRBio in collaboration with IH and BCI and in consultation with GBIF and NCBI.

GRBio will operate as a moderated community-curated resource.  IH, BCI and biorepositories.org invite the community to visit www.grbio.org to check and update their records and to register institutions, collections and staff members that have not already been registered.  GRBio offers registration of institutional collections, 'personal' research collections that have not yet been accessioned into an institutional repository, and privately owned collections.  New or updated records will go into a moderator's queue for review before being published to the public registry.  Submitters will receive email notifications when their data are received and published after review.

There are more than 7,000 institutions registered in GRBio and all but 280 have a globally unique InstitutionID (a Darwin Core term).  These institutions are using approximately 130 InstIDs that are ambiguous because they are used by more than one institution.  These institutional records are posted at http://goo.gl/Uanjjd, sorted by InstID and country. If you work at one of these institutions, please update the institutional record in GRBio.  If you information about any of these institutions, please leave your comments at this site or contact GRBio through http://grbio.org/content/contact-us. 

IH is managed by Barbara Thiers at the New York Botanical Garden and remains online at http://sciweb.nybg.org/science2/IndexHerbariorum.asp. New IH data entered through GRBio will be transferred to IH and vice versa.  BCI was developed by Roger Hyam and hosted by Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and is now closed.  Biorepositories.org was developed and managed by CBOL and is also now closed.  

We welcome your participation in GRBio and your feedback on the registry.

Best regards,

David

Barcode of Wildlife Project now on Google+: http://goo.gl/2nKAkT

David E. Schindel, Executive Secretary
Consortium for the Barcode of Life
202/633-0812; fax 202/633-2938; portable 202/557-1149
Email: SchindelD at si.edu 
CBOL website

Office and overnight delivery address:
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Smithsonian Institution
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