Re: Botanical Gardens Database
- Subject: Re: Botanical Gardens Database
- From: S* A* O*
- Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 11:40:55 -0700
At 10:31 AM 5/17/2002, David King wrote:
>Went looking on the web for the address of a local Botanical Garden and it
>took almost 30 minutes - could have found it in the phone book faster but
>that seemed so... quaint... <snip>
David -
Yes. I understand your statement. As one who searched the web routinely
for information, the 'quaintness quotient' is rather high and useful
information at a premium.
Hard to figure out an answer. I have seen a variety of long lists of
botanical gardens while searching for one in particular, and I often try
and collect data about other gardens during my search. I find the very
long, comprehensive lists of gardens rather tedious to deal with (too much
information?), preferring instead a list organized by region, type of
garden, plants, etc. My specific interest, for the mediterranean climate
gardening web site, are those garden which have some relevance to the
mediterranean climate - sometimes hard to discern when the web resource is
in another language, no map is provided, and regional location names are
obscure.
South Africa is a good example - only the Western Cape is a mediterranean
climate, much of the rest bring a summer rainfall/winter dry region! And
Afrikaan names are hard to get a handle on, hard to find information for,
and generally presented on the web as if all the world understand their
regional relationships (I'm not picking on SA in particular - I've often
had the same problem with many Mediterranean countries as well as Australia).
The maintenance of such lists is a lot of work, and the information within
them often gets out of date very quickly. The longer the list, the more
opportunity there is for the information to change underneath you. It
takes a pretty obsessive type to enjoy updating such information. Often
someone spends a lot of time of such a project but eventually "burns out"
and said list seems to become static.
Among the other parts of the mediterranean climate gardening web site I've
tried to build and expand our list of gardens. It takes a bit of time and
effort and the current list is only sporadically filled in and may contain
some erroneous entries. I am especially interested to know how best to
organize information regionally for those countries that are unfamiliar to
me. If anyone has some input, since this topic has come up, I would be
grateful to hear it. If anyone would like to assist in this effort, I
would be even more grateful!! ;-)
http://www.MediterraneanGardenSociety.org/gardens/Public.cfm
Regards,
Seán O.
h o r t u l u s a p t u s - 'a garden suited to its purpose'
Seán A. O'Hara fax (707) 667-1173 sean@support.net
710 Jean Street, Oakland, CA 94610-1459, U.S.A.
