1997 Meeting
The 1997 meeting was held in Taipei, associated with the 26th General Assembly of IUBS (the International Union of Biological Sciences). Although the attendance at last year's annual meeting was reduced on previous ones, some important goals where attained: we had direct contact with the IUBS Executive and since then a number of contacts and consultations have been channelled to our secretariat through them; some standards were reported and discussed; for the first time in TDWG a discussion for standards covering the whole range of organisms took place; and venues for the TDWG meeting for the next three years were offered by the Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum, Berlin, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts and The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. Details are available in the 1998 issue of the TDWG Newsletter and on the TDWG web pages.

Mid-year executive committee meeting
February 23-24 Stephen Jury (Chairman), Georgina Mackenzie (Newsletter editor) and the Secretary convened to discuss several aspects of the Newsletter, the 1998 meeting and other TDWG activities.

TDWG Listserver
The secretariat was committed to set up a listserver for TDWG. Although problems relating to the availability of the server administrator were encountered, the listserver has now been running for some months. The message traffic has not been impressive to date! I expect this to change with suitable publicity and efforts on the part of our members and all interested in data standards and databases for biodiversity.

The listserver address is TDWG-List@csic.es subscription is moderated by the administrator of the list (currently the secretary Paco Pando, pando@ma-rjb.csic.es), although the messages in the list are not.

TDWG Web pages (http://plants.usda.gov/npdc/index.html)
The USDA NRCS National Plant Data Center continues to support the TDWG pages. This year through the efficient work of Alta Burns and the supervision of Scott Peterson.

POSS published in electronic format
The Plant Occurrence and Status Scheme was fully produced and approved some years ago. The effective lack of a Standard Editor since 1995 has delayed the publication of this standard. The Secretary retrieved the electronic document, made its re-formatting in html and subsequently it has been available on the Internet through the TDWG pages.

ITF-2
The secretary was informed by Diane Wyse-Jackson (Botanical Garden Conservation International), convener of the subgroup, that the publication of the International Transfer Format for Botanical Garden Collections version 2, --approved and ratified last year-- is being delayed due to editorial changes suggested by BGCI members. These changes do not affect the transfer format itself. A provisional version of the ITF-2 standard is available at the BGCI web site: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/BGCI/news.htm

The Secretary is aware that during this year there have been some delays and omissions in his duty. This has been caused mostly by in-house commitments, and the pressures from within his institution are always bigger than those coming from the other side of the Internet.

The Secretary wishes it to be known that he is available for re-election for just one more year, and proposes to the membership that if they want to re-elect him, then they should consider nominating an Associate Secretary for the next term. The Associate Secretary could then take the post of Secretary with a smooth transition and with a good knowledge of TDWG affairs. In this way, the problems experienced three years ago can be avoided. Besides, the Secretaries could back each other up when local commitments required.

Respectfully submitted,

Francisco Pando de la Hoz

TDWG Secretary