The Assessment of the Needs of Free-Standing Museums for the Computerization of Collections Management and Related Research

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Dr. W. Wayt Thomas is a Curator at the New York Botanical Garden, and he has organized an ambitious two-year planning activity involving a Consortium of eight of the largest free- standing (i.e., non-University, non-Federal) natural history museums and botanical gardens in the U.S.: the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the New York Botanical Garden, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pittsburgh), the Missouri Botanical Gardens (St. Louis), the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Bernice P. Bishop Museum of Natural History (Honolulu), and the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco). The Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) and the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History are ex officio members of the Consortium. The Consortium proposes to engage the Mitre Corporation as an independent consultant for analysis of the data management needs in each of the eight member museums, and for recommendations concerning hardware architecture and approaches to system software. These needs would include databases of specimens, and institutions, and general interoperability with the biological research community. The results of the needs assessment and the recommendations for system design would then be used in future proposals for large-scale computing hardware. Each of the Consortium museums has initiated creation of computer databases for their specimen holdings, and the research community will increasingly expect access the these data in easiest possible way. This collective planning activity will highlight common needs and solutions that could be shared among institutions, thereby ending the tendency for the museums to diverge in their data management practices, and increasing the level of interoperability among the nation's biodiversity reference collections. The creation of the Consortium and the results of this project will provide benefits to the entire biological research community by coordinating the management of data used by diverse scientific disciplines.