Today we meet Ana Casino, the Executive Director of CETAF. CETAF stands for the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities. It's a unique network in Europe that gathers natural science institutions. 

Tell us about CETAF:

We are 71 institutions across 22 countries in Europe –and what do we do? We promote natural sciences collections, of course, by highlighting the value of these collections, and the information contained in these collections to preserve biodiversity. ‘Biodiversity’ means bio- and geo-diversity, because we collect and we gather both kinds of collections.  

What is the added value that CETAF can bring to this project? 

We thought that having the community at the centre of the project could give a lot of added value to the project. Why? Because we do provide best practices, we do provide standards, we do provide the way scientists conduct research and how we provide the data to other sources and to other platforms. 

The importance of data sharing...

CETAF participates directly in the development of the resource infrastructure named DiSSCo: DiSSCo stands for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, and the community believes that by providing standards to the rest of the scientific community in publishing, in digitisation, we believe that the data source will be much more robust and much more comprehensive to really contribute to the project. 

What's the added value of BiCIKL to CETAF?

I think that this project anchors on the community, and therefore anchors on a bottom-up approach, which means that all the standards, all the guidance, all the guidelines and the recommendations that will evolve and be delivered by the project can be much more easily endorsed and approved to be implemented. I think this is one of the beautiful things about having this new community implemented.