9312146 Xu and Haynes The proposed project is to develop a prototype bilingual (English-Chinese) herbarium database of the plant collections at Sun Yatsen University in China. Through cooperation between researchers at the University of Alabama and the Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou, China, the existing inventory of approximately 150,000 specimens at the Sun Yatsen Herbarium will be entered into a computer database which is accessible in both English and Chinese. This may serve as a prototype for other bilingual herbarium databases. This is particularly important for US researchers who currently have very limited access to information in China's herbaria, which include collections from not only China but also Southeast Asia, a vital area for tropical biodiversity. The project is expected to result in a database in English summarizing the label information of all plant collections at the Herbarium and in software that provides an interface for Chinese and English database management.
