Dear fellow taxonomists,

BioSys Software & Multimedia is the developer of ELEDONE, a collection management program. Apart from providing our customers the program, we also try to make as much basic taxonomic information available as possible. After all, who likes typing?

Within a few weeks we will ship version 1.0 of a free plug-in module, families.app, to all our customers. The plug-in will enable our customers to upload and/or download family names of most major groups of animals to their ELEDONE system. The information stored in this plug-in was compiled with help from some of you. Later this year we will compile a document by using this family information to be made available to all of you for free. Our policy is to put all taxonomic knowledge compiled by us into the public domain. The listing containing the family arrangement will be made available to you by sending a document to TAXACOM with the document attached (probably in ASCII or MS-Word format, we welcome any suggestions).

One of our next projects is the compilation of species authority files. Already available are files containing over 14,000 names of Mollusca, all mammal species of the world, and all Drosophilidae of the world. We are looking for additional files. Anyone who contributes to this project will be send any other species authority file he or she wants for free. Wanted are:

Lists of species of animals and plants (Recent and fossil), which are as complete as possible. We prefer DBF style files formatted as follows (an empty DBF file, specs.dbf is attached to this document):

NAME OF FIELD FIELD TYPE FIELD WIDTH

family CHARACTER 25 genus CHARACTER 25 subgenus CHARACTER 25 species CHARACTER 65 subspecies CHARACTER 50 race CHARACTER 40 kindcode NUMERIC 1 (1=marine; 2=terrestrial; 3=fresh water) recfos NUMERIC 1 (1=extant; 2=extinct)

An example (a Polyplacophora species, Mollusca) would look like:

family Chitonidae genus Chiton subgenus Rhyssoplax species olivaceus subspecies olivaceus Spengler, 1797 race kindcode 1 recfos 1

Please note that author and year of publication are included in the species, subspecies or race field.

We hope that some of you are able to contribute. Other autority files that you may have (on paper or as an ASCII or word processor document) are also welcomed. Hope to hear from you soon!

Sincerely,