Alison Hamilton, a zoology graduate student at the University of Florida, was hired to create a crosswalk of scientific to common names for the project. As of April 14, 1999, she had completed the listings for 5,310 species in the following categories of organisms:

Authorities consulted in the construction of this crosswalk may be found at: http://susdl.fcla.edu/lfnh/authority.html

The thesaurus team consisting of Gail Clement (Lead,FIU), Stephanie Haas (UF), Dr. Helen Laurence (FAU), Mark Hinnebusch (FCLA), Elaine Henjum (FCLA), Mary Ann O’Daniel (FCLA), and David Stage (Consultant and Director of Florida Geographic Data Board)have identified and ordered software and hardware necessary for text analysis and thesaurus development and study of the ANSI #Z39-1193 Guidelines for the Construction, Format and Management of Monolingual Thesauri. Elaine Henjum (FCLA) and Gail Clement (FIU) completed beta testing of the text analysis software. Five hundred pages of text were manually analyzed to select terms related to the south Florida ecosystem.

The CERE thesaurus under development by Gary Waggoner, Chief, Information Management and Outreach Branch for the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological survey is being considered for adoption as the "base" thesaurus for the project. Twelve additional thesauri have been identified as sources for term inclusion.

Texts recommended for digitizing have been turned in by 10 of the 11 authorities asked to participate. A complete listing for each category may be found at http://susdl.fcla.edu/lfnh/selection.html. Permission to digitize texts have been solicited and obtained from a variety of copyright owners (see the following URL for list of all permissions http://susdl.fcla.edu/lfnh/digit/track.html. A listing of texts recommended, permissions granted, and digitization progress may be found at http://susdl.fcla.edu/lfnh/digit/track.html

Digitization

As of April 14, 1999, student technicians hired by Erich Kesse (UF) have digitized seventy-two works.

As of April 14, 1999, the Florida Environments Online database was established on the Web at http://webluis.fcla.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/fclwlv3/wlv3/DBwldbaz/DGgen /RP2/CM02/DGref/DBQC/P1basic

Record conversion has occurred for Florida Geology (1061 records), and is currently in process for Florida Ornithology (130 records for 1985, 1987), Florida Freshwater database (914 records), Florida Agricultural History (381 records), and Florida ecosystems (54 records). A majority of the record conversions were done by Stephanie Haas (UF) and Vernon Kisling (UF, Florida Agriculture)

A PC software application to support the template that enables records to be entered by non-librarians is under construction by two staff computer programmers, Gerald Snyder and Gail Lewis. This template will be beta tested in May 1999. Full implementation is expected by October 1999.

FCLA staff, Mark Hinnebusch and Dotti Delfino have identified the relevant BlueAngel software components after several conferences with the technical staff of the vendor. Compatibility and suitability attributes of the product have satisfactory been agreed upon by FCLA staff and the vendor’s staff. The product has been ordered. In addition, FCLA has hired a Senior Computer Programmer to install and configure BlueAngel. However, we did not get the programmer on board until April 16, 1999 instead of October, 1998 as originally calculated in the budget. This is a 6.5 month delay. We have two options to compensate for this delay: (1) extend the end date of the grant, or (2) provide additional in-house technical staff to do twenty-four months worth of work in eighteen months. We prefer the first alternative if possible. This is an issue that we need to discuss at your convenience.

Finally, FCLA has added initial multi database query ability to the library catalog’s z-server.