In an early burst of activity, Marilyn Schotte sent us CDs with over 200 isopod images. I've done preliminary processing on them, and have little doubt that these will be excellent contributions to EOL species pages (among other uses). Remaining... working out the licensing and copyright issues connected with them. A sample image is attached.

On April 27 I had the opportunity to spend a day with Paddy Patterson's group in Woods Hole. He directs the IT operation underlying EOL, but has a background in systematics and an outlook that is broader than just EOL. Paddy generously allowed me to suck up a day of his and his staff's time to get a better sense of where we stand on digital taxonomic issues. What I wanted to find out from was whether the roadmap we were contemplating for the peracarid taxonomy and associated information would fit well into ongoing digital initiatives.

The answer in brief, is “yes”.

Some specifics:

• There isn't any sort of grand unified taxonomic hierarchy in existence on the Web today. We should pick the best digital venue for our findings, based on our own needs. It's up to us to subsequently convince digital taxonomy providers (such as ITIS, Catalog of Life, GenBank, etc.) to adopt our classification once it's online. So the plan of working with marinespecies.org still seems like the best way to go.
• EOL's LifeDesk system is undergoing rapid development, but isn't quite “there” yet. The goal of LifeDesks is to provide a platform for gathering and maintaining the digital taxonomic and species information for a taxon. The system is in its early stages, and so doesn't support everything we'd like (yet). However, with time, LifeDesks may well be a good place to migrate our collected data once our initial project is complete. That would enable sub-taxon editors to have direct control of the online information on their group. We'll revisit this in a few years, while working with LifeDesk programmers in the meantime.
• In a general sense, we're hunting down the right path. As a group, we definitely should be looking for our own digital home for our taxonomy. We definitely should be hanging whatever information we find useful from that taxonomic backbone (though not necessarily on the same website). We definitely should be making our information as accessible as possible using pre-existing web standards.

Last Wednesday and Thursday (22-23 April), Chris Freeland came down to Los Angeles from the Biodiversity Heritage Library group at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

We (Regina, Chris, and Dean) had excellent chats about BHL's present and future directions, relationship with EOL and other organizations, and how we (the peracarid group) and BHL might best work together.

We even arranged for a small whale to be playing in the surf at Manhattan Beach for Chris's visit (that's comprehensive hosting arrangements).

Excellent meeting, well worth all our time. We're looking forward to working further with BHL!

Welcome to the new website for the Peracarida workgroup. It's just coming into existence, so there will be changes and additions as time moves on.

For those of you working together with us (attendees at the Catalina conference, plus a growing list of others), you will have the ability to add information to this site and edit what's here. I (Dean) will soon send you information about logging on to make changes or post information.

Thanks to all for joining this participatory peracarid process.