10/30/07

Aric Wiest, the FGSC Asst. Curator, got himself on the American Phytopathological Society Collections and Germplasm Committee. This is a key time to be involved. The APS and the USDA are opening discussions on how to preserve microbial germplasm for future researchers. At present neither the ATCC or the NRRL labs have the breadth of  focus to handle the wide variety of organisms that are found in nature.Meanwhile, the USFCC has not published minutes since 2001. The USFCC has been more closely aligned with the Society for Industrial Microbiology in recent years. Perhaps it is time for more APS members to join the USFCC!

10/17/07

The FGSC Advisory Board meeting has come and gone. I am left with a charge to make more progress in updating the FGSC database and web-site. There are tools out there. At the ICCC11, I met with Peter Dawyndt of StrainInfo.net. They have an interface that searches many sites for strains and compiles the output into a meaningful format.
The ICCC11 was a great success and a tremendous learning opportunity for me. I got to meet people I had previously only known from e-mail including Lynne Sigler of the University of Alberta Microfungus collection and herbarium and David Smith of CABI and also President of the WFCC.

I also learned a bit about the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and met the Director of Biotechnology, Iain Gillespie. The OECD has published guidelines for Best Practices in a Biological Resource Center.

I did finally get the traffic data on the FGSC web-site. We are well used. The 6 million hits came from nearly 400,000 unique users. Many pages in the FGSC site are viewed with the top ten pages only accounting for about 5 percent of the hits.