UNADOK, - Natural history collections in the Norwegian university museums

As a result of a pilot project started in 1994, collections to be computer registered have been identified and quantified. Local representatives of the scientific and technical staff at the museums have met and discussed this work. Non-professional labour, provided during government employment programs have been used in order to meet the aim of this project: to make the natural history collections electronically accessible. Data entry supervision and information validation are conducted by the scientific staff. Some collections have already been computerized (i.e., all birds in the four zoological museums, and the collection of originals and type specimens in the Paleontological Museum in Oslo), and are in the process of being transferred to a World Wide Web server. Obstacles regarding copyrights, research clauses (confidential reports with time restrictions), lack of labour and space have in most cases been overcome during this period. International approval of the role museums play in biodiversity research further underscores the need to have collection data available on the Internet.