Freie Universität Berlin	FU	BERLIN	
Zentraleinrichtung
Botanischer Garten und 
Botanisches Museum
Berlin-Dahlem
Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem, FUB,
Königin-Luise-Straße 6 - 8, D - 14191 Berlin	

	

	Telefon:	8 30 06  - 166
Fax:	8 41 72  - 954
email: 	biocise@zedat.fu-berlin.de 
URL:	http://www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/biocise		
GeschZ.:V     Bearbeiterin: Frau Steinmann
     	     	Datum: 	23-09-98
     		
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Dear Sir or Madam,

The EU-financed Concerted Action project "BioCISE" (Resource Identification for a Biological Information Service in Europe) has the aim to identify and analyse biological collection information systems in Europe. Project membership currently consists of 20 scientists from a variety of disciplines, coming from 10 EU states and Israel. The results of the survey is being made public on the World Wide Web and will serve as a base for project proposals aiming at the creation of a common European Information Service on biological collections. 
For the purpose of the survey, we use a broad definition of the term "Biological Collection", including living collections (e.g. microbial strains, botanical and zoological gardens), natural history collections (mainly in museums and universities) and field data collections (such as used in floristic and faunistic mapping projects and ecological surveys). The size of the collection is not important – on the contrary, we are particularly interested to include smaller and specialised collections in the survey.
Further information regarding the aims of BioCISE can be accessed on the World Wide Web under the URL given above. Of course you can also contact us directly. 
We assume that your institute is using (or constructing) at least one database to manage your collection(s). We should therefore like to ask you to answer the attached questionnaires (Laboratory and Database). If you are using more than one database, please kindly fill in a separate database questionnaire for each of them. Since we strive for a general overview of European biological collections we would like to ask you to fill in the laboratory questionnaire and send it back, even if you do not use a database.

We wish to thank you in advance for your effort

Yours sincerely

Dr. Walter G. Berendsohn (Project Co-ordinator)