The e-conferences will be concerned with priority-setting for the GBIF seed money awards that will be made by the Digitisation of Natural History Collections (DIGIT) and the Electronic Catalogue of Name of Known Organisms (ECAT) Work Programmes.

Participation in the e-conferences is open to all interested parties, who need to register to participate in one or both of the e-conferences. Register for the ECAT e-conference by clicking here and for the DIGIT e-conference by clicking here. Background and instructions documents can be accessed through the same links.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) was created in March 2001 as an open, independent international organization dedicated to making the world's biodiversity data freely and universally available via the internet. Importantly, GBIF is open to participation by all countries, economic entities and organizations that can benefit by the open sharing of biodiversity information on a global scale. Two of GBIF's work programmes, DIGIT and ECAT, concentrate on facilitating the expansion of biodiversity knowledge by

• working with natural history collections and observational data communities to promote the digitization and dynamic accessibility of observational and specimen data (DIGIT), as well as
• working with organisations like the Catalogue of Life partnership, uBio, nomenclators such as IPNI and BIOSIS, and developers of regional checklists to incorporate data on nomenclature and taxonomy into a comprehensive electronic catalogue of the Earth's biota (ECAT).