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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.
About the BCA
The EBCA project, and the associated INOTAXA project (INtegrated Open TAXonomic
Access), 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. The INOTAXA project was recently renamed from Biologia Centrali-Americana
Centennial (BCAC) to reflect the larger scope of the project as defined from
its inception.
A major resource for Mesoamerica, and the initial focus of this project, is
the Biologia Centrali-Americana. The text and plates are available here as navigable
JPEG images, now accessible as the EBCA. Currently the resource is available
through the Internet, but production on CD-ROM is being considered. The EBCA
is the first step towards an extraordinary new set of electronic resources and
knowledge tools for biodiversity studies - INOTAXA. This will be a model for
biodiversity informatics worldwide, to meet the global need for access to information
for science, public policy, eco-tourism, and other uses.
For INOTAXA the text of the BCA is 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. More recent treatments and descriptions
will be added over time to complement the BCA and provide a more complete set
of resources for the region and ultimately other regions. All relevant data
sources will be made available through a single access point. Details of this
ground-breaking project are presented in the documents linked from the "Project
Status" and "About the Project" pages.
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