Katja’s email reply to Dallas, copied to me, listed the problems EOL had. Dallas has undertaken to make the necessary changes at a further cost to me.
Four months ago I asked Dallas Wallace, a local IT expert, if he could scrape the website gallery to create an XML file for the Encyclopaedia of Life to complete the process of The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain becoming a Content Partner. After a succession of missed self-imposed deadlines by Dallas, I today sent the file to Katja Schulz at the EOL.
On 28 April, I emailed Steve with a list of 264 frames to be captured as stills, a fifth of which were of night footage. An early result of this massive capture is the addition of four pages to the Gallery, including one (Page 10) devoted exclusively to night shots. This represents a 44% increase in the size of the Gallery. Christina has just about completed the work, bar the addition of a few IDs for which I am waiting. Since each page only contains twelve images, we have plenty of stills for future use.
On the 26th I received an email from Katja, Species Pages Coordinator for The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), in reply to an email I sent to EOL some time back expressing my interest in contributing to the project. The remit of EOL is to illustrate and document every species known to science. It has some heavyweight cornerstone institutions and a steering committee on which equally illustrious institutions are represented.
The options Katja mentioned prompted me to send her an email telling her about my video archive and asking whether video contributions could be included, whether the EOL structure allowed for records of the biodiversity of ‘One Small Place on Earth’, such as Tamborine Mountain or the Galapagos Islands, and asking her to advise me on the best way I could contribute.
Her reply was most gratifying, stating that I have a great collection of images and videos on my site which she would be very interested in having on EOL, that EOL considers video a very important medium for the documentation of biodiversity and that the best way I could contribute would be to register as a Content Partner. The email exchange has… Read Complete Text
A month after going online, the website is included in PANDORA, Australia’s National Web Archive.
This gave me a great thrill, as much for Clive and Christina, after all the years of hard work.
My very good friend Clive Tempest, the architect of this website (his partner Christina is its brilliant designer) has persuaded me to start a weblog on these pages.
People really seem to like the website. They like the look of it, the colours and the variety of content. This is most pleasing to the three of us.
From time to time I’ll send something out into the void which will hopefully connect with you!