About the Project

The EBCA project, and the associated INOTAXA project, grew from a desire by the partners to widen greatly the accessibility of the information they hold. Currently data needed to undertake many kinds of research, including taxonomic, are available only as a scattered and widely distributed resources, inaccessible or unknown to the majority of the people who need them. Many of these data are held by the project partners, in their libraries, attached to specimens in their collections, in their card indices or in databases.

A major resource for Mesoamerica, and the initial focus of this project, is the Biologia Centrali-Americana. Currently the text is made available here as navigable JPEG images. It is also being marked up into XML and will be made fully searchable. Species and other taxa will be viewable individually, and links established from suitable points to collections databases, catalogues of names, other digitized texts, and web tools. In this way all relevant data sources will be made available through a single access point. Initially the resource will be available through the Internet, but production on CD-ROM is being considered. Details of the project are presented in the documents linked to from this page.

As of 2016, the pages hosting the eBCA are no longer being maintained, though the content will be stable until central support for the platform is unavailable. The entirety of the Biologia Centrali-Americana is available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library, including the volumes for Archaeology, with additional services such as taxonomic name finding, easy navigation of the text, and the ability to create custom pdfs of the content.

• http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/730

Project Documents

• Project Overview Document (PDF; December 2005)
  Five-page summary of the EBCA and of the BCAC with conceptual model
• Proposal for initial funding to the Smithsonian Institution to the Atherton Siedell Endowment Fund for the EBCA

PowerPoint presentations

• Anna L. Weitzman & Christopher H. C. Lyal. taXMLit: a vital piece of the puzzle for digitally interoperable taxonomy. Presented at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group meeting, Christchurch, New Zealand, 14 October 2004.
• Anna L. Weitzman & Christopher H. C. Lyal. Data Standards: objective data, subjective data, and data interchange. Presented at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group meeting, Christchurch, New Zealand, 14 October 2004.
• Anna L. Weitzman, Christopher H. C. Lyal, & Thomas Garnett. The Biologia Centrali-Americana Centennial: A vision for electronic access to taxonomic resources, the information interface between libraries and systematic biology. A talk presented at The National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, June 2004.
• Christopher H. C. Lyal & Anna L. Weitzman. The Electronic Biologia Centrali-Americana: A vision for electronic access to taxonomic resources: the information interface between libraries and systematic biology. A talk presented at The Natural History Museum, London, February 2004.
• Anna L. Weitzman & Christopher H. C. Lyal. Implementing the Global Taxonomy Initiative Objective 3: Increasing Access to Taxonomic Information in Meso-America. Poster presented at Convention on Biological Diversity, Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, 9th meeting, November 2003.

Other articles, etc.

• "Century-old biology text gets an e-life" by Cara Seitchek. The Torch, no.3 (8 August 2003)