Project history
Launched in 1995 by two biology professors at the University of Ottawa, Antoine Morin and Jon Houseman, BIODIDAC was the first French online database of images in zoology, botany, human biology, and histology for teaching biological sciences. While the site itself was bilingual, it was the availability of free illustrations labeled in French that made it stand out. It included almost 6,800 items: black and white diagrams, colour diagrams, and photographs.
BIODIDAC images and numerous references to this collection are still found around the Web, a testament to its significance in biology education. In 2014, registration statistics indicated that BIODIDAC had close to 8,300 registered users from 150 countries. It was estimated that each year, almost 25 million students around the world benefited from BIODIDAC materials.
In 2019, BIODIDAC went offline for security reasons and lived on a local server, forgotten and in dire need of server migration and technological upgrades. This site brings back BIODIDAC for a new generation of biology teachers and students who stand to benefit from this wealth of free and open images.
Project team
Roxanne Lafleur, Digital Humanities Support Specialist, University of Ottawa Library
- Role: Managing JSTOR Forum and Omeka instances, training of students and other contributors, supervising workflow, review and bulk upload of metadata and original images, participation in proofreading
Sofia Perin, Ph.D., 2nd Year Laboratory Coordinator, Department of Biology, University of Ottawa
- Role: Verification and correction of title, view and description already assigned to each image, adding title and description to images lacking these details, revision, correction and standardization of species classification and common names
Mélanie Brunet, Ph.D., M.I., Open Education Librarian (Interim), University of Ottawa Library
- Role: Project manager, creation of pages and update of textual content on Omeka site
Colin Montpetit, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, University of Ottawa
- Role: Subject matter expert and pedagogical assessment
Contributors
- Tyler Stephens, Open Education Assistant (Coop Placement), University of Ottawa Library (Winter 2023)
- Bailey Burkard, Student, Lisgar Collegiate Institute (2023)
- Sophie Guirguis, Undergraduate Student in Biology, University of Ottawa (Summer 2023)
- Chloë Boilard, Undergraduate Student in Biology, University of Ottawa (Summer 2023, Fall 2023, Winter 2024)
- Vanessa Young McGee, Laboratory Technician, Department of Biology, University of Ottawa (Fall 2023, Winter 2024)
- Siriram Ramalingam, Teaching Lab Technologist, Department of Biology, University of Ottawa (Fall 2023, Winter 2024)
Acknowledgments
Huma Zafar, former programmer analyst at the University of Ottawa Library, completed the migration of the original version of BIODIDAC from Faculty of Science servers.
Antoine Morin and Jon Houseman, the two University of Ottawa biology professors behind the original BIODIDAC. Professor Morin passed away in 2018 and Professor Houseman retired in 2016 and we are proud to bring their work to new generations of students, educators, and researchers. They contributed content, maintained the original site, secured funding, and supervised the work of artists and students.
The original project also benefited from the expertise and equipment provided by other professors at the Department of Biology: John Armstrong, François Chapleau, Peter Heinermann, and Christiane Charest.
French descriptions of histology images were provided by Philipe Lagacé-Wiens and Ibrahima Diallo (Université de Saint-Boniface).
BIOEDNET, Luc Brient, Jean-Marie Cavanihac, Jean-François Cornuet, Pat Crawford, André Cyr, Donna Giberson, Richard J. Harris, Peter Heinermann, Eliane Larras-Regard, Ivy Livingstone, Claude Renaud, Josée Soucie, Rebecca Stritch, University of Alberta Department of Biology, and Patrick Wells contributed the photographs and drawings contained in BIODIDAC.
Funding
The original project was made possible with funding from the “Programme de perfectionnement linguistique” from Heritage Canada and the Government of Quebec through the Regroupement des universités francophones hors-Québec (RUFHQ). The University of Ottawa Senate Committee on Teaching provided a Teaching and Learning Grant supporting the Digital Zoology Project that served as the springboard for BIODIDAC. Finally, the Ontario Ministry of Education provided funding to the BIOEDNET project for the development of content.
The current project is made possible with funding from the Government of Ontario through eCampusOntario, and support from the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa and the Science Students’ Association (uOttawa).
BIODIDAC logo
The BIODIDAC logo was designed by Mélanie Brunet using Ivy Livingstone’s 1997 illustration of "Equisetum sp.," which is part of the BIODIDAC collection and made available under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Copyright
BIODIDAC is hosted in Canada at the University of Ottawa and complies with Canadian copyright law.
All images in the BIODIDAC collection are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. They can be shared and adapted freely as long as the creator is given appropriate credit, a link to the licence is provided, any changes to the original are indicated, and they are not used for commercial purposes.
If your use of an image in BIODIDAC goes beyond what is allowed by this licence, please contact the copyright holder to request permission. Fees collected in exchange for such permission will be donated to the Antoine Morin Memorial Scholarship at the University of Ottawa.
Attribution
To respect the attribution condition of the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, we recommend crediting BIODIDAC images as follows:
- Title of item, Creator of the item, Source, Licence
Example: Necturus maculosus, https://omeka.uottawa.ca/biodidac/items/show/4316, Ivy Livingstone, BIODIDAC, CC BY-NC 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/