The Biodiversity Data Journal has just published "The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories: A Call for Community Curation" (http://bdj.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=10293; doi: 10.3897/BDJ.4.e10293) as its first Forum Paper. The registry was created by the Consortium for the Barcode of Life and is managed by Scientific Collections International, both of which are hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
Abstract The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories is an online metadata resource for biodiversity collections, the institutions that contain them, and associated staff members. The registry provides contact and address information, characteristics of the institutions and collections using controlled vocabularies and free-text descriptions, links to related websites, unique identifiers for each institution and collection record, text fields for loan and use policies, and a variety of other descriptors. Each institution record includes an institutionCode that must be unique, and each collection record must have a collectionCode that is unique within that institution. The registry is populated with records imported from the largest similar registries and more can be harmonized and added. Doing so will require community input and curation and would produce a truly comprehensive and unifying information resource.
