Australian Museum College St Sydney, NSW 2010, Australia
The WWW is a medium that provides enormous scope for reaching audiences that would otherwise be impossible to access. At the same time its growing use as a standard information source has encouraged an attitude to information discovery that is based on a short attention span and an intolerance of poor presentation and delivery. If we are to ….make recorded knowledge the common property of everyone, not just the elect few (GBIF Vision) then we need to meet the challenge this represents by ensuring we include our user audience in the development process. The Australian Museum has developed a number of web based collection mapping applications over the past 5 years. Our most recent endeavour, BioMaps, has sought to incorporate a comprehensive user audience involvement in the application and website design. The process used, insights gained and lessons learned, provide a message of encouragement for including stakeholder input in all of our (the bioinformatics community) website and application development.
The Australian Museum acknowledges the support of the Rio Tinto/Australian Museum Partnership.