Enabling Cyberinfrastructure for Engaging Biodiversity Collections

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The University of Kansas is awarded a grant to improve the Specify software. The Specify Software Project (http://specifysoftware.org) supports 112 biological research collections (museums and herbaria) with software and technical support for the digital capture, management and web accessibility of their collections data. The mission of the Project is to mobilize and deploy data gathered, vouchered and documented during 300 years of the biological exploration of the planet for education, research and application in science and society. The Project develops and supports Specify, a Windows-based, open source, collections data management application for multiple taxonomic disciplines. Specify provides baseline software support to small, medium and large research collections. Without a licensing fee and with free helpdesk and data management support for non-profits institutions, Specify is the only affordable, professionally engineered and supported package for many major U.S. research collections. The goals of this award are (1) to strengthen support of biocollections computing, by providing ongoing helpdesk and data management services related to our current Specify application, (2) to grow the number of collections that use Specify to 150-200 by the end of 2007, (3) to redesign the Specify user interface as part of a usability engineering process to make the application easier to learn and use, (4) to collaborate with European and other international initiatives to define more useful standards and interfaces for collections data, and (5) to re-engineer Specify into a versatile, three-tiered, object-oriented platform, written in Java, and optimized for user interface extensibility, code-reuse, and community development collaboration. The transformation in Specify's software architecture will position and enable Specify collections to participate fully in emerging grid computing environments.