Stan Blum is the Research Information Manager at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. By academic training he is a systematic ichthyologist (the classification of fishes; Ph.D. Zoology, University of Hawaii, 1988). Since 1990, however, he has been working full-time in biodiversity and natural history collections informatics. The two most important themes in his work have been: 1) designing integrated information systems for natural history museums (i.e., systems that support a wide variety of collection disciplines, collection management practices, and uses of collection information), and 2) developing data standards and software architectures that will enable data to be integrated across distributed and heterogeneous collection databases. He recently organized "A Workshop on the Compilation, Maintenance, and Dissemination of Taxonomic Authority Files." The purpose of the workshop was to provide an initial forum for members of the systematics and library/information science communities to discuss concepts, practices, and technologies that will promote consistency in the cataloging, indexing, and retrieval of biological information. Workshop results indicated that biological taxonomy and classification would provide a challenging test bed for cross-discipline work involving thesaurus development, authority control, cooperative cataloging, and multi-thesaurus integration. Participants recommended that the dialog between the communities continue, particularly under the framework of DL research.