Dear Member of the Speleogenesis Network,

I’m delighted to announce important new developments in Speleogenesis website which greatly improve its functionality and enhance services provided for website members. 

The update of the website has primarily concentrated on basic functionality of the templating engine and overall design. The site is now more stable and more secure. Much work has been done to make sure that in the future it will be easy to add new functionalities and provide better services to members of the Speleogenesis community. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the new design of Speleogenesis website.

Of many features and utilities that are at work, few important ones are already available. The most important one is a new Member Area. All existing Speleogenesis members have full access to the new environment, so no new registration is needed. Just log in with your Speleogenesis credentials and start exploring the new Member Area.

Improved member profile

It is now very easy to update your member profile: with few mouse clicks you can change password, update email, upload avatar, edit some other personal data like affiliation and professional interests. Depending on your visibility choices certain items of this information will become available on your Public Page. 

Public page

Public page is a new feature which I am happy to announce. It may serve like your internet page. Besides your personal details, you can add a custom text of an unlimited size (hint: you may use it as your curriculum vitae). Also you can create and make public your list of publications. These all will be visible on your Speleogenesis Public Page. I kindly encourage you to make your Public Page as informative as possible. It is important and beneficial to all of us that individual professional profiles of hundreds of karst and cave scholars would be available from a single system, the Directory of Researchers. 

New Karstbase

Another major development is KarstBase. This online cave and karst science bibliography database has been available for beta-testing during several years, although its interface and submission options were rather premature. Nevertheless, KarstBase has managed to grown dramatically and now covers over 10200 titles. Now we present the greatly improved KarstBase. 

It is integrated with the Speleogenesis Journal and its Featured Articles section, fully covers 16 major journals in the field (World Cave & Karst Science Journals) among other sources, and has a special online management system for editors of corresponding journals which enables them to directly maintain and update their respective contents in KarstBase. Any member can easily submit bibliography items into the system using simple and convenient form available from Member Area. Now you can make Karstbase growing faster. It would be a great idea to make sure that your own relevant publications on karst and geospeleology are all included!  You can also add an e-book or thesis which will be displayed in respective sections of the site. 

These are some of the new developments. More features are on their way (listed at the bottom of the Member Area page). 

As the new system is quite fresh, there might be some stability issues. We would greatly appreciate your feedback. The feedback form will be made available very soon.

The Speleogenesis Team sends you its best wishes on the eve of Christmas! Before you switch onto the holiday mode, I invite you to explore new face of the Speleogenesis website and new options available there. Please, also encourage other karst scholars, who may not have joined the Speleogenesis Network yet, to register with the site and contribute to the development of our important professional resources.

Last, but not least, I’d like to emphasize on the great role of our webmaster, Alexey Koptchinsky from Austria, whose deep devotion, hard work and outstanding expertise in web design has made all these developments possible. On behalf of the Speleogenesis community, I sincerely thank him. I also thank the staff of the Ukrainian Institute of Speleology and Karstology (UISK) who contributed lots of efforts into putting together various data sets used for the Speleogenesis developments. 

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

-- Alexander Klimchouk
President, UIS KHS Commission