Present: Malcolm Beasley (London), Guda Bernard (Utrecht), Barbara Collecot (Wisley), Lucien Debersaques (Gent), Gina Douglas (London), Brent Elliott (London), John Flanagan (Kew), Peter Hirsch (Berlin), Lennart Hultin (Alnarp), Jane Hutcheon (Edinburgh), Antoine Jacobsohn (Paris), Sven Koeltz (Koenigstein), Deborah Lane (London), Cees Lut (Leiden), Roger Mills (Oxford), Elena Nazarenko (Kiev), Judy Reed (New York), John Reed (New York), Fiona Richmond (BIOSIS), Pilar San Pio (Madrid), Grozdana Sirotic (Zagreb), Tanya Thompson (BIOSIS), Julien Van Borm (Antwerpen), Ronnie Viane (Gent), Diny Winthagen (Amsterdam)
From Meise: Gert Ausloos, Katrien Clarysse, Raymond Clarysse, Leen De Bondt, Régine Fabri, Nicole Hanquart, Chris Kosolosky, Jan Rammeloo, Patrick Rombout, Carine Vanden Berghe

Apologies: Sarah Ball (Dublin), Kaia-Kadri Gailit (Tallinn), Wenche Hafsahl Johansen (Oslo), Terttu Lempiänen (Turku), Elzbieta Nowak (Kornik), Marjatta Rautiala (Helsinki), Ingrid Skoglund (Goteborg), Tamara Tchernaja (St. Petersburg), Maria Joao Tendeiro (Lisbon)

Introduction and themes
EBHL Chairperson Gina Douglas and EBHL Secretary and host librarian Raymond Clarysse introduced the meeting.
Malcolm Beasley's proposal to record this and future meetings in order to facilitate minute-taking was accepted.
Jan Rammeloo, Director of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium, was invited by the Chairperson to formally open the meeting and give a short talk about the history and the future of the Garden.
Julien Van Borm, Director of the Libraries of the University of Antwerp, gave a most enlightening talk on "The Belgian Union Catalogues, past, present and future". While explaining library cooperation in Belgium, he also sketched the complex structure of the Belgian federal state and concluded that the future of union catalogues is rather uncertain because today's easy access to electronic information reduces the need for union catalogues.
After a short break, Tanya Thompson from Thompson Henry Ltd. presented BIOSIS, an expansive index to life science and biomedical research available through online, CD and Web formats. In the question time that followed it appeared that :
- five of the participating libraries have access to BIOSIS
- there is an evolution towards a US consortium and a European consortium
- the need for comparable, standardized usage-statistics is strongly felt (librarians should no longer buy products that do not offer that possibility).

The afternoon session started with a walk through the Garden guided by Gert Ausloos followed by a visit to the Plant Palace. The group photographs were taken by Frieda Billiet, head of the Living Collections. After a short stop in the Garden shop, the delegates returned to the Castle of Bouchout, where the business meeting began.

Business meeting
New members
Three new EBHL members gave a brief presentation of their libraries and institutions:
- Elena Nazarenko from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kholodny Institute of Botany, Scientific Library, Kiev (she circulated a photograph album, showing part of her library and some of its special books) ;
- Antoine Jacobsohn from the Société Nationale d'Horticulture de France, Paris ;
- Ronnie Viane and Lucien Debersaques from the Koninklijke Maatschappij voor Landbouw en Plantkunde, Gent.

Report of the Treasurer
The Treasurer's Report was read and accepted. The Audit Committee ( Deborah Lane & John Flanagan) had previously scrutinized the accounts and found them perfectly in order. The Financial Report for 2000 was distributed, listing 6 personal members, 40 institutional members and 10 associated members. Cees Lut confirmed that the biennial subscription arrangement which was agreed upon during last year's meeting indeed reduces bank charges. He told the members that he expects banking costs will drop once we start using EURO.

Report of the Secretary
Raymond Clarysse apologized for not having been able to prepare the draft version of the membership directory in time, because of the organization of this meeting. He announced that the draft directory and the minutes of this meeting would be sent to the Board for corrections and approval. Gina Douglas thought that there would be many changes necessary to the directory.
Cees Lut remarked that it is also important to update the website monthly and that Ingrid Skoglund awaits all changes of address, email, etc. [Her e-mail address: Ingrid.Skoglund@ub.gu.se ].

Relations with CBHL
John Reed briefly discussed his own institution, the New York Botanic Garden, and developments there. He presented the Vision, Mission and Core Values Statements as a part of the CBHL Proposed Long-Range Plan. The aim is that libraries end up collaborating instead of competing with each other. EBHL members were highly impressed by the possibilities shown to them, and it was suggested that EBHL, too, should propose a long-range plan.
CBHL numbers approximately 230 members, of which 80 are personal memberships. The institutional members each have 2 or more representatives.
To complete his presentation, John Reed announced that the work of the late Erik A. Mennega on "Taxonomic Literature" will be continued by Lawrence Dore and Daniel Nicholson from Washington.

International Botanical Congress Vienna 2005
The next International Botanical Congress (IBC) takes place in Vienna in July, 2005.
It was felt that EBHL should participate as an organization and, if possible, with the help of CBHL. The EBHL board urged all members to contribute with suggestions for papers, poster sessions, etc., and asked for real commitment. The question was raised whether the EBHL meeting should coincide with IBC in Vienna, as CBHL did last time. John Reed strongly advised to do so and suggested that EBHL and CBHL should join forces. Jane Hutcheon replied that a joint meeting indeed might be financially more economical. She desperately asked for suggestions and volunteers. Judy Reed suggested to take a look at the CBHL abstracts relating to the IBC of 1999 at:
http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/CBHL/symposium.html

Future EBHL meetings Venues for future EBHL meetings were announced as the Royal Horticultural Society, London in 2002, the University of Zagreb in 2003, and Vienna in 2005.
Brent Elliott will be host and chair of the 2002 meeting.
A potential venue for 2004 would be the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin.

BIOSIS access
The cost of a standard subscription to BIOSIS amounts to 27.000 US $. Because this sum exceeds most member libraries' budgets, the possibility of a consortium bid for access to BIOSIS was discussed. Seven members were interested (Raymond Clarysse, Gina Douglas, Brent Elliott, John Flanagan, Jane Hutcheon, Deborah Lane, Ronnie Viane).
CBHL suggested taking BIOSIS on CD-ROM to cut down costs (20.000 US $) and observed that one institution has to be prepared to take the lead financially.
Tanya Thompson said that she would put her presentation on the list server, as well as the answers to the questions raised at the meeting. [This has been done in the meantime.]
[On the 11th of June, Jane Hutcheon informed us that EBHL has been offered a free 30 day trial for those interested.]

Any other business
Sven Koeltz sketched the history of KOELTZ from the start in 1901 as a bible shop to the shift towards botany in 1986. From then onwards, Koeltz also started publishing books and selling second-hand books. As Koeltz is very specialized, competition is practically ruled out.

Elena Nazarenko and Grozdana Sirotic were happily surprised to receive a NHBS book voucher from Jane Hutcheon. Jane had been approached by NHBS with the request on how to help libraries from Eastern European countries and had suggested to sponsor the libraries of Kiev and Zagreb.

Malcolm Beasley then expressed his interest in digitisation programmes and asked for some ideas on and recommendations for buying digital equipment. This item concluded the business meeting.

18th May
The next day, Roger Mills gave a talk on gateways to web resources in life sciences. He explained the BIOME project, a catalogue of useful quality assessed internet sites for teaching and research, and referred to other similar international gateways.
The BIOME web addresses are: http://rdn.ac.uk or http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk (for training resources), and http://biome.ac.uk and http://nature.ac.uk (for direct searching of the BIOME and natural world database). These give free searching of the service.
Roger also mentioned thesauri relating to portal development and the range of terms for different users which they need to accommodate, together with cooperative cataloguing projects. He also briefly considered the Global Forestry Information Service and other forestry information systems being developed.
He then discussed FORELISE (Forestry Libraries and Information Services in Europe), a project he himself is in charge of. As soon as it is operational, EBHL members will be notified through the e-mail list.
He then gave details about a project called CHIPS (Clearing House for Information in Plant Sciences), a proposal to create a web-based cross-sectoral referral centre for plant sciences information resources. Under the leadership of Oxford University Library Services, the following institutions have agreed to collaborate in the project : The British Library, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Imperial College, The Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Royal Horticultural Society. The CHIPS project is pending further discussion with interested parties.

After the coffee break, Brent Elliott and Deborah Lane presented the International Nursery Catalogues project of the Royal Horticultural Society of London. Their presentation developed from proposals made at last year's meeting and compiled the results of the questionnaire they sent out in 2000.
Brent and Debbie demonstrated the trial ACCESS database and asked the members for their suggestions and comments.
The proposed database was thoroughly discussed and the suggestion that it would be useful to put a test version on the EBHL website was accepted.
Finally, it was unanimously agreed upon a show of hands to proceed with this project. The database is going to be available as soon as a decent number of RHS holdings have been described. A notification by e-mail will follow.
To conclude his presentation, Brent handed out a query on antiquarian book cataloguing.

A possible theme for next year's meeting arose out of a gathering of the delegates in the hotel. It was brought up that the users of libraries are sometimes confused about the different user facilities. In fact, they expect the same treatment in all libraries.

John Flanagan gave some preliminary information about an internal project of the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens called ePIC (Electronic Plant Information Centre). It aims to make available, on the Internet, all of the major collection, bibliographic and taxonomic databases held at Kew; to provide a means to conduct searches across them ; to introduce into the mix images and textual documents. Any questions about this project should be addressed to Mark Jackson, project manager at Kew.

The Meeting was closed at noon with a sincere vote of thanks to the National Botanic Garden of Meise for hosting the event, and, to quote the Chair : "... for the chocolates, the beautiful surroundings and the elegant dinner".
Words of gratitude also went to Chair Gina Douglas. The 8th EBHL Meeting will be remembered as the first where everything was on time !

After lunch, a visit was made to the Plantin Moretus Museum and the Municipal Printroom in Antwerp, followed by a guided tour through the historic part of town. The day was concluded by a light evening meal.
Transport by bus this Friday was sponsored courtesy of IDC-Publishers, Leiden.

Meise, August 24, 2001

Leen De Bondt
Carine Vanden Berghe