4. Appendices 

A) Example questionnaire (BioLink) 

Dear Dr. Shattuck, 

on behalf of the Global Biodiversity Facility (GBIF), the Botanic Garden and Museum Berlin, Dept. of 

Biodiversity Informatics is carrying out a survey of collection management and data capture solutions. The 

scope of this survey is restricted to publicly available systems that are used by natural history collections. 

BioLink has been identified as one of the important software tools for collection management which should 

be itemised on this list. So far, we have collected the following information from your world wide web site 

(http://www.ento.csiro.au/biolink/software.html). 

  > Availability and cost 

Freely available (send email to biolink@ento.csiro.au) 

  > Limitations to scalability 

n/a, DBMS is Microsoft SQL Server 

  > Computing platform limitations or specialization 

Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, client software has been sucessfully installed on an Apple Macintosh G3 

running PC Soft Windows 

  > Specialization by taxonomic group 

All taxa 

  > Contact information and URL 

Dr. Steve Shattuck 

CSIRO Entomology 

P.O. Box 1700 

Canberra  ACT  2601  

Australia 

Phone:  +61  2  6246 4272  

Fax:    +61  2  6426 4264 

Email: ento biolink@csiro.au 

URL: http://www.ento.csiro.au/biolink/software.html 

  > Data import capabilities and/or limitations 

Import wizard imports from various formats such as tab delimited text files, Excel spreadsheets, Access, 

and DBF databases 

  > Data export capabilities and/or limitations 

Raw data export via user defined report module 

  > URL or other source of database model documentation (tables, attributes, relationships, and their 

semantics) 

http://www.ento.csiro.au/biolink/development.html 

We would like to ask you to correct these information as well as completing the following items which we 

could not see from your website. 

  > Estimate of size and distribution of user base 

  > URL or other source of user documentation 

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