eBot

An image bank of Australian flora

Abstract

eBot is an initiative of the University of Sydney Faculty of Science, School of Biological Sciences and the University of Sydney Library. eBot supports the use of images for research, teaching and learning in the plant sciences, with a specific focus on the Australian context. To date, images have been submitted by members of the university community. All content is freely available to the wider community as web-ready or powerpoint-ready objects. Images are metatagged according to botanical conventions with plant ‘family’ as a mandatory field for plant images. The collection is presented, indexed and navigated using the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF). XTF can be adapted to suit diverse metadata, and this flexibility offers a way of accommodating future phylogenetic changes. We believe that this way of organising and tagging biological images could serve as a model for sister repositories in the sciences.