About Bauble

Bauble is a software application to help you (whoever you are) manage a collection of botanical specimens. It is intended to be used by botanic gardens, herbaria, arboreta, etc. to manage their collection information.

What am I looking at?

Bauble is a web app for managing plant collections; Bauble was born as a desktop application, and as such it has been briefly been updated and supported as bauble.classic, until the Bauble desktop application diverged so much from the Bauble web app that the maintainer of bauble.classic preferred to rename it to Ghini and to develop it further under that name. You may want to check out the Ghini web site.

Features

• Bauble is designed to be simple and fast, elegant and intuitive.
• Bauble is open and free. Bauble is licensed under the ISC license which approximately means that anybody can download, study, distribute, change the source code for Bauble and much more. This does not in any way affect how you decide to copyright and license the data you manage with Bauble.
• Bauble is cross-platform. Bauble supports both Linux and Windows and has been successfully ported to other platforms whenever there was interest.
• Bauble can use different database backends and is tested against SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB.
• Bauble can generate reports through an XSL formatter backend. There is no fancy report designer but there is an interface that allows you to pass the results of a search through an XSL formatter and the extremely flexible Mako formatter. This allows you to layout your data any way you wish and save it in a just about any format you can imagine including PDF, XML, or HTML. Hopefully we'll get something a bit more user(i.e. non-techy) friendly in the future.
• Bauble can export data in CSV or Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) format. Bauble adheres to the ITF2 standard for field naming and content, but it does not yet contain an import-export feature for this format. Other import-export formats can be discussed and added to Bauble if the need arises.
• Bauble supports tagging. You can tag any arbitrary data stored in a Bauble managed database with arbitrary names. This way you can create collections of records organized the way you want with names you give them.
• ....and lots more. (And I mean lots!)

Documentation

The readthedocs web site currently hosts documentation for both bauble.classic and ghini.desktop. The bauble documentation site will soon describe bauble.web.

Bauble Development

You can visit the project page and browse the latest source code from github at Bauble/bauble.web or check it out with...

git clone https://github.com/Bauble/bauble.web.git

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why another collection manager application?
   At Belize Botanic Gardens we felt that the other collection management software was either too expensive, inadequate or only supported Windows so we decided to create our own.
2. But why for free?
   We feel that current collection management software is overpriced especially for small institutions in developing countries. Biodiversity affects our entire world and everything that relies on it to live. To help protect such a fragile system the management of information related to biodiversity should not be restricted.
3. I found a bug. What can I do about it?
   For bug reports, but also for technical and generic questions, get a github account and file a bug report here.

Contact

For more information about Bauble/Ghini or if you have any other questions and you do not want to get a github account, please write to bauble@googlegroups.com. A developer for either Bauble or Ghini will reply as soon as possible.

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