As detailed in the Resource Discovery section, the Global Resource Discovery System (GBRDS), through its registry component, also takes on the role of a central registry for data resources, institutions, and services. This new GBIF registry has been put into operation in July 2010, replacing the UDDI registry that had been in operation since the early proof-of-concept implementation of the GBIF web portal.

The Integrated Publishing Toolkit comes with a self-registration mechanism – just follow the software installation guidelines.

If you decided to install and register one of the earlier systems, please contact the Help Desk for your registration, and include the following information in your message:

• the public access point URL of your software installation
• the name of the institution that the access point is to be registered under
• if the institution is not yet registered in the GBIF Data Portal: the name of the GBIF Participant Node that the institution should be endorsed under
• a confirmation that you read and understood the GBIF Data Sharing Agreement, and agree to its conditions