On the day before I left for Europe I had emailed Katja Schulz in the hope that she could arrange for the remaining corrections to the XML data to be carried out while I was away. Alas, no such luck. On October 11 I received an email from Katja stating that she could not publish my material until she received updated information. I sent this today, in the form of a corrections document which listed every error I had found on the EOL preview site, plus one or two on my website.
Dallas copied me the corrected XMLs he sent to EOL, which will hopefully be acceptable.
At long last I heard from Katja Schulz again. She told me that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain is on the verge of becoming a Content Partner on EOL. She provided me with a preview of all the pages to which I have contributed images and it was a thrill to not only see the list but very pleasing to click on an entry and see my video frame on the page. I emailed her, pointing out a couple of errors and asked her if she wants me to go through all the pages before she publishes them.
I last heard from Katja Schulz on March 11. Dallas emailed her the changes he had made on April 11. I emailed her on April 22 asking her if EOL had received his email. I emailed her again on May 13. And now I have sent her an email titled ‘Limbo’, because that is where I appear to be with EOL. Katja has tended to be quite prompt in replying to my emails, so this silence is out of character, rather worrying and by now unacceptable.
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