Dear Sir/madam,

I am a librarian in the Bioinformatics Center, University of Pune, India. I am pursuing my Ph.d. in Library and Information Science. I am pursuing this research under the guidance of Prof. Harsha Parekh, (Chair) SNDT University, Mumbai and Prof. Geoffrey Bowker (co-Chair) UCSD, USA. My research area is Biodiversity informatics and in particular the construction of the database structure for Indian fungal species. The structure of the database is based on the Information needs of various types of users such as Mycologists, agriculturists, medical mycologists, industrialists, etc. During the study I will synthesize the contents of the various primary (books, journal articles) and secondary (abstracting services) sources of information as well as existing worldwide databases available on the Internet. Apart from this I have designed a questionnaire to be circulated to the various researchers from these areas.

The questionnaire is available online at http://202.41.70.82/ques/quesup.htm

It has been observed that several worldwide efforts concerning "Biodiversity Informatics" are underway with the aim of digitizing biodiversity data and making the results of biotic surveys easily accessible on the Internet. But little importance has been given to documenting fungi species. It has also been observed that these databases are inadequate to use for average users and scientists. First, they are not comprehensive in coverage and are unable to answer all possible questions of the users. Second, they are too complex to understand and designed without consulting users.

I am writing to ask you to kindly help me understand your information needs by providing the maximum possible information, your candid comments and suggestions by filling the online questionnaire. If you have any difficulties in filling the questionnaire please contact me at shubha@bioinfo.ernet.in Filling up the questionnaire will not take more than 15-20 mins. I would also appreciate if you forward the same to the students, other researchers at your department/ organization

Thanking you in advance

Sincerely Shubha Nagarkar http://bioinfo.ernet.in/library/personal/main.html