Expanding our participation at the IBC further, CBHL contributed a resolution for consideration by the committee that was putting together final resolutions to be voted on by the Congress in its closing session.

The text submitted to the resolutions committee came from Charlotte Tancin, Sylvia Fitzgerald and Malcolm Beasley.

The committee removed the original CBHL preamble (since our text was being combined with other proposals), added a few additional types of collections to our list, and kept the rest of our wording intact.

The final version appears as bulleted item 5 of 6 under resolution IV (highlighted below in bold).

Resolution IV says:

Recognizing that plants are the essential basis of human existence on Earth; and that plants provide our food, most of our energy and medicines, maintain the atmosphere we breathe, give essentials for life to all other organisms and are a source of beauty and inspiration in our environments; and yet recognizing that human actions are resulting in the widespread extinction of species of plants and other organisms, rivaling the mass extinction events of the past;

Botanists of 85 nations meeting at the XVI International Botanical Congress in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, in August 1999, therefore call on governments and policy makers to:

recognize the importance of developing and maintaining scientific expertise, provide resources for the education and training of scientists, and maintain career opportunities, so that young people will enter scientific fields, especially in the biological sciences;

ensure that knowledge of sustainable processes is fully developed, disseminated, and shared throughout the world;

actively develop floras and detailed accounts of the plants of all regions, which provide the basic information used to protect plants and utilize them sustainably;

support collaborative programs between developed and developing countries;

ensure high priority be given to the maintenance of botanical museums, herbaria, libraries, archives, gardens, living plant collections and gene banks, to ensure the long-term survival and ongoing accessibility of these hard-won collections for present and future researchers;

provide for the wide dissemination of information throughout the world by facilitating universal access to the increasingly powerful tools of electronic information management and communication.

This resolution was passed along with others at the final session of the Congress.

The CBHL Symposium presented at the XVI International Botanical Congress

Core Literature Project: Historical Monographs in Botanical Sciences

Glossary in preservation

Links to professional organizations and associations

Links for plant libraries and archives resources