The Birder's Notebook is not only designed to record and retrieve all your birding observations, it's designed to be a comprehensive library as well. How does it work?

Using The Birder's Notebook you can create Checklists and for each species in the Checklist you can attach up to 6 pictures, 6 audio tracks, a map, as well as lots of text. We call this a Multimedia Checklist. After you have created the Checklist and added the multimedia stuff the information for each species in the Checklist can be accessed just by clicking on the species name from the main list. You can create as many Multimedia Checklists as you wish, for instance, covering different areas. Then if a species is covered in more than one Checklist you get access to both sets of information just by clicking on the species name.

Each species can be covered in up to 16 different Checklists so that you could have, theoretically, 96 pictures and 96 audio tracks for each, accessible by just a couple of mouse clicks. And you can display the information for many different species on the screen at the same time. The Birder's Notebook will normally support displaying up to 50 or 60 pictures simultaneously (and they often make a great looking screen display if they're tiled on the screen).

Obviously its a lot of work to come up with these Multimedia Checklists but you don't have to do all this work yourself although it can be a lot of fun to take the pictures in one of those old, obsolete field guides you have hanging around and scan them in using your extremly high resolution scanner - which almost everybody has these days. Its amazing how much better scanned in pictures often look compared to the original if handled properly and, while the text in field guides may be out of date, well-painted pictures rarely are.

To help you get started the NorthAmerica checklist provided as part of software installation is already setup as an empty Multimedia Checklist so all you have to do is to start dropping links. Otherwise use the Beginners Help to convert the other Checklists provided as part of the installation to Multimedia Checklists or to create your own from scratch.

If your friends develop Multimedia Checklists you can easily put these on your system. (There are a couple of ways to to this. Contact GGS for details or watch this space).

Finally you can purchase Multimedia Checklists such as The Land Birds of Southeast Brazil in CD form or over the Web. These run on your machine independantly of The Birder's Notebook. But The Birder's Notebook is designed to import the data from them and combine it with all the other infomation on each species so that its available with just a mouse click or two. Just like a Library!