The Transits were key events in the international development of science. The project will bring together information and images from historical transit observations - instruments, illustrations, photographs, people, expeditions, and sites - to create a database drawing on as wide a range of sources and repositories as possible.

We are seeking a small group of partners to take part in the project's initial development. This will involve providing digital materials and contributing to the testing and refinement of the web site.

Partners should ideally represent collections with Transit-related materials, whether artefacts or archives. We would hope to work closely with at least one individual from each partner in developing the detailed site design. The technical development will be carried out by the University of Oxford's Academic Computing Development Team.

The software development will begin early next year but we would like to begin discussions with initial partners as soon as possible. The public website will be launched in Autumn 2003 and we hope that it will then gather further materials and contributions to create a major resource before the next Transit in June 2004.

To register an interest or seek further information please contact one of the three members of the SIC working group:

Stephen Johnston
Museum of the History of Science, Oxford
stephen.johnston@mhs.ox.ac.uk

Sara Schechner
Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard
schechn@fas.harvard.edu