Data in FishBase have been entered, modified, or checked by about 500 FishBase staff and collaborators (see Fig. 2). In order to keep track of who did what and thus be able to give credit and to ask the right person for clarification, each FishBase record has a ‘stamp’ with the following format:

Entered : 02 19/03/91

Modified : 18 28/04/94

Checked : 01 03/06/94

where, in this example ‘02’ stands for Susan M. Luna who entered the information on 19 March 1991, ‘18’ is Liza Q. Agustin who modified the record on 28 April 1994, and ‘01’ is Rainer Froese who verified the information in the record on 3 June 1994. This stamp can be accessed by clicking on the Status button in the footer of any record. Double-clicking on the Collaborator number opens the COLLABORATORS table which gives the Name (and photo, if supplied), Institute, Address, Telephone, Fax, E-mail and a description of what the collaborator contributed to the project.

The COLLABORATORS table is also intended to enable FishBase users to directly contact the person who knows most about the data in question, i.e., normally the one who checked or entered it, or the author(s) of the appropriate section of this book.

Remember that to date only about half of the records in the SPECIES table have been checked, and much less in other tables. If you volunteer to help us in this task, please print the record in question, write your corrections or ‘okay’ on it¾ preferably in red ink¾ and mail it to us. We will make the corrections in FishBase and put your name, address, etc. (please provide) in the COLLABORATORS table. If your contribution is substantial, we will also send you a free copy of the FishBase CD-ROM.

You get to the COLLABORATORS table by clicking on the Collaborators button in the FishBase Main Menu, or in the SPECIES window, or by double-clicking on the Collaborator number accessible in any record under the Status button.

On the Internet, you can access the COLLABORATORS table by clicking on the name of a collaborator as shown in the footer of most data pages. You can create a list of collaborators either in the ‘Information by Country/Island’ or ‘Information by Topic’ sections of the ‘Search FishBase’ page, by selecting the respective radio button.

Rainer Froese