Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria |
Extract from Jim Croft's retirement speech for Gred Whitbread, 27 Feb 2015:
Greg came to the Gardens from CSIRO Plant
Industry, where he was a technical officer in
the Herbarium. He had, at the time, a unique
combination of skills - he knew how to spell
'herbarium' and he could spell 'computer' and
'Unix'. That met the selection criteria.
We went head-hunting him for the Gardens
soon to be established database. At the time our
herbarium labels were being typed on a stand-alone word processor. We had to do better.
And so the fun began. There were no rules. So
we made them up. No-one said we couldn't
do anything so we just did it. There were no
collections databases, so he made one. There
was no network, so on weekends we crawled
through ceiling cavities dragging cables. There
were no data standards, so we made them up.
There was no internet, so we built a website.
And people all over the world copied us.
We built a team around collections, botanical
information, and technology. And what a team
it was. If you plotted them on the Myers Briggs
personality spectrum, you could not have got
them further apart if you tried. And we argued.
We shouted at each other. We swore at each
other. We threw things at each other during
meetings. We managed to evacuate the cafe
with one of our arguments.
It was truly a
crucible of creativity.
Greg's legacy to the Gardens, and to ABRS, and
to the national and international biodiversity
communities has been enormous.
Here is a short and partial list of what he has
driven or contributed to in a big way:
- in his previous life, collection of a number
of type specimens;
- design and building of the herbarium
database;
- integration of ANBG's Living Collections database;
- integration of ANBG and CSIRO herbarium
databases;
- integration of Photo database;
- APNI, APC;
- the International Plant Names Index;
- Flora of Australia Online;
- IBIS;
- HISPID data standards;
- international data standards;
- international data management applications;
- the direction of TDWG;
- vision of free, open shared data;
- the world's first live database to internet
gateway;
- the world's first botanical and second
biodiversity web server;
- the shared vision for Australia's Virtual
Herbarium,
which was
the inspiration for GBIF and the ALA;
- the National Species List.
The important aspect of all this was that
Greg saw no distinction between a herbarium
and gardens as a collection of plants and the
herbarium and gardens as an information
resource. As a result we regarded the database
not as something separate, but as in integral
part of the collections.
This, and the vision of free open shared data, is
Greg's real legacy.
by Jim Croft 27/2/2015
Source: Extracted from:
Australasian Systematic Botany Society Newsletter 162-163 (March-June 2015) p.42-43
Portrait Photo: 1010, M.Fagg, now in ANBG Photo Collection.
Data from 156 specimens