EDIT - European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy -

An EDIT and SYNTHESYS initiative, hosted by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels

On 4 and 5 November, 2008 EDIT and SYNTHESYS held a joint meeting on how and what natural history collections can do to broaden the user base of their collection services.

In this context the meeting brought together 37 participants, collection managers, conventional users, non-conventional users and other stakeholders. The morning programme consisted of presentations on different collections management policies and uses of collections (data and objects). The two afternoon sessions were devoted to discussions in break-out groups and in a plenary setting - addressing how natural history institutions, individual researchers and networks like EDIT and SYNTHESYS can contribute to open-up collections for a broader use.