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Project personnel and their roles

Brian Pitkin had overall management responsibility for the Department of Entomology's five-year project to create an index to the species-group taxa represented in its unrivalled, internationally important collections of insects and other terrestrial arthropods. Brian designed and programmed the data entry interface using Paradox PAL, running over a Novell network. Brian liaised with colleagues on their data-entry requirements and provided IT Support. On completion of data entry of the Coleoptera Brian checked all data for internal consistency; wrote a series of Paradox PAL scripts to restructure and convert the data to DBase IV for import into Microsoft Access for web-deployment; and modified the LepIndex website to suit the Coleoptera Collection and Card Index data.

Martin Brendell managed the data entry of the Coleoptera Collection Index data by his team of curators and others.

Some of the Coleopterists

Left to right: Curators Martin Brendell, Max Barclay, Malcolm Kerley, Sharon Shute, Stuart Hine and Scientific Associate Roger Booth - some of those responsible for indexing the Coleoptera collection.

Martin and the Coleoptera curators - Jane Beard, Stuart Hine, Malcolm Kerley, Sharon Shute, Max Barclay, Christine Taylor and François Genier - entered c. 52% of the c.215,000 records. Harold Gwythers, Reg Clarke working as volunteers with the Coleoptera team, entered an additional c. 28% and c. 3% of the records respectively. The remaining c. 27% were entered by other curators in the Department of Entomology - Paul Brown, Judith Marshall, Jon Martin and Mick Webb. Another volunteer, Ruth James, entered the senior synonyms of species of Elateroidea.

Alison Shean is currently digitally scanning the Coleoptera Card Index, importing the data into Microsoft Access and databasing the resulting images, using a clone of VIADOCS originally created by George Beccaloni for the LepIndex project.

George Beccaloni and Mike Sadka designed and programmed, respectively, the LepIndex website on which the Coleoptera Collection Index website is based and Mike Sadka provided considerable help in modifying it to suit its new purpose.

Written by Brian Pitkin, January 2004. Last updated 09-Sep-2004