GrottoCenter Blog

The UIS is proposing to UNESCO that September 13 be declared International Karst and Cave Day. UNESCO is expected to make a decision soon, and we can take advantage of September 13, 2025, to ask our UNESCO ambassadors to support this project. All information is available here IDCK If you are in France I suggest you contact Our Ambassador https://unesco.delegfrance.org/Contact-us , Ms. Ahlem Gharbi Here is the message I sent to her Madame l'Ambassadrice, Je vous écris en tant que président de l’association Wikicaves qui a son siège en France et qui œuvre dans le cadre de l’Union Internationale de Spéléologie pour rendre accessible les informations sur le milieu souterrain (https://grottocenter.org) afin de permettre sa protection. Comme vous le savez peut-être, la République de Slovénie a préparé un projet de proposition pour la 222e session du Comité exécutif de l'UNESCO demandant que le 13 septembre soit proclamé Journée internationale des Grottes et du Karst (IDCK). ...

We have undertaken to build a global digital library dedicated to the underground environment. As part of this project, we have just set up two servers that allow libraries to easily retrieve everything contained in the Grottocenter BBS. https://wiki.grottocenter.org/wiki/GrottoCenter:En/OAI_and_Z39.50_servers Among the initial partners in this project is the Belgian Speleology Federation. During her internship at the Maison de la Speleologie, Camille worked with Nathalie and Loran to contact all the clubs to obtain authorization to archive their publications. Nathalie is currently digitizing the documents that have not yet been digitized. The first results, which everyone can benefit from, are as follows: The publications of the Charleroi Speleology Club are available https://grottocenter.org/ui/documents/208875 As well as those of the Belgian Speleology Club https://grottocenter.org/ui/documents/21672 https://grottocenter.org/ui/documents/230092 The Liège Speleology Club make...

Camille Renard and Yohann Schatt, engineering students at Polytech Montpellier, have just completed an internship as part of the project, led by the International Union of Speleology, to create a global digital library on Karst and the underground environment. The first partners of this project are, in addition to the UIS and its commissions, the Italian Speleological Society (SSI), the Belgian speleological organizations (UBS, Maison de la Speleologie, Spéléo J), the SCNAT through the scientific commission of the Swiss Speleological Society and the Wikicaves association, which organized these courses and participated in their financing. Thank you all. Camille completed her internship in Namur with Nathalie Gouffiol, librarian at the Maison de la Spéléologie. She developed a fully functional OAI-PMH server that allowed Nathalie to retrieve analyses for articles from the journal Regards and integrate them into her database. To achieve this, Camille relied on the OAI standard as well ...

Work continues to organize the sharing of data on the underground environment. Speleoteca has been under ODbL license for a few days now. This will allow data exchanges with the BBS on Grottocenter and with the Maison de la Speleologie de Namur (Speleo J) without having to submit a request, as all three databases are under the same license.

As part of ongoing efforts to facilitate data exchange between documentation centers dealing with the underground world and karst, the Namur Underground Heritage Library has recently placed its database under the ODbL license. This allows for automatic data exchange with other libraries using the same license, particularly with BBS data accessible on Grottocenter.

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