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

Wayt Thomas博士是纽约植物园的馆长，他组织了一项雄心勃勃的两年规划活动，由美国最大的八个独立(即非大学、非联邦)自然历史博物馆和植物园组成的财团参与：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)、密苏里州植物园(圣路易斯)、洛杉矶县自然历史博物馆、伯尼斯·毕晓普自然历史博物馆(火奴鲁鲁)和加州科学院(旧金山)。菲尔德自然历史博物馆(芝加哥)和史密森自然历史博物馆是该联盟的当然成员。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的数据管理需求，并就硬件结构和系统软件的方法提出建议。这些需求将包括标本数据库和机构，以及与生物研究界的一般互操作性。然后，需要评估的结果和系统设计建议将用于今后关于大规模计算硬件的提案。每个博物馆联盟都开始为其标本收藏建立计算机数据库，研究界将越来越多地期望以最容易的方式获取这些数据。这次集体规划活动将突出各机构之间可以共享的共同需求和解决方案，从而结束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藏品之间的互操作性水平。该联盟的成立和该项目的结果将通过协调不同科学学科使用的数据的管理，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.