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

W. Wayt Thomas博士是纽约植物园的馆长，他组织了一项雄心勃勃的为期两年的计划活动，包括一个由8个美国最大的独立（即非大学，非联邦）自然历史博物馆和植物园组成的联盟。美国自然历史博物馆（纽约）、纽约植物园、费城自然科学院、卡内基自然历史博物馆（匹兹堡）、密苏里植物园（圣路易斯）、洛杉矶县自然历史博物馆、伯尼斯·p·毕晓普自然历史博物馆（檀香山）和加州科学院（旧金山）。菲尔德自然历史博物馆（芝加哥）和史密森尼自然历史博物馆是该协会的当然成员。该联盟建议聘请Mitre公司作为独立顾问，分析八个成员博物馆中每个博物馆的数据管理需求，并就硬件架构和系统软件方法提出建议。这些需求将包括标本数据库、机构和与生物研究界的一般互操作性。然后，需求评估的结果和系统设计的建议将用于今后关于大型计算硬件的建议。每一个联盟博物馆都已经开始为他们的标本收藏创建计算机数据库，研究团体将越来越期望以最简单的方式访问这些数据。这一集体规划活动将强调各机构之间可以共享的共同需求和解决方案，从而结束各博物馆在数据管理实践中存在分歧的趋势，并提高国家生物多样性参考馆藏之间的互操作性水平。该联盟的建立和该项目的成果将通过协调不同科学学科使用的数据管理，为整个生物研究界带来好处。

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.