Harsha Parekh

Fungal Species Information: Its Organisation for World Wide Web for Multiple Users Harsha Parekh

One of the greatest need in Biology is information management. Traditional LIS skills such as conducting user surveys to understand their information needs,organizing information and creating access mechanisms are natural tasks of librarians,which may be applied to digital repositories and databases as well. In the field of biodiversity, LIS professional can contribute in areas like data standarization and metadata,developing thesauri and terminologies, managing data interoperability issues & data cleaning activities. To achieve this there is a need for collaboration among LIS professionals,information technologists and subject experts. The present study sought to test the feasibility of a three-way collaboration to develop a database prototype in the field of mycology. The study has two components- research & development. Research component covered an assessment of information needs of mycologists, & other users. Based on the needs & looking at the way scientists maintain their data about fungal species, a prototype database was developed. The book is useful to students and librarians & also to all embedded librarians who work with domain experts.