ABI Sustaining: Supporting Biological Collections Computing with Specify

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For more than 250 years, thousands of professional, student and citizen biologists have strived through wide-ranging but detailed exploration to discover, observe and document the diversity of earth's wild species. Hundreds of biological museums across the U.S. hold the research products from innumerable biotic surveys and inventories, namely millions of curated specimens of animals and plants. Those unique vouchers document the identity and distribution of species across the planet, as well as document geographical patterns of biological diversity. Research based on biological collections not only generates scientific knowledge of species and their distributions, it also employs specimen data in computational models for predicting the biological impacts of climate change. Specimen data are also used for informing national and regional conservation priorities, and in environmental education and professional training. The primary goal of the Specify Project is to provide software to mobilize all of the taxonomic, geographic and ecological information associated with museum specimens to internet-based information portals for public access, policy and research. Specify is used by 284 U.S. research collections to digitize, manage and publish specimen holdings data. The software platform also facilitates the tracking of museum specimen transactions and legal compliance for the acquisition and curation of new collections from earth?s remaining wild places. Specify modernizes and extends the impact of the investment made by biological researchers, leveraging the truly monumental, three-century investment in biological survey and inventory. Specify Project software accomplishes this by facilitating the publication of data previously sequestered in museum cabinets with software support to computerize the information and to bring it to freely-accessible, open access, web information portals. During the course of this effort, the Specify Software Project will derive and implement a business model to financially support its core software engineering and technical support activities. Through community consensus-gathering activities, we will obtain advice from university administrators, museum and research directors from biological collections institutions around the country in order to identify a revenue model to sustain the technical support activities of the Specify Software Project. We will interview representatives of U.S. research institutions currently using Specify to assess the likelihood of their participation in various fee-based and consortium membership-based options for ongoing Specify support and software updates. In consultation with business advisors we will synthesize the findings of those community activities and propose a revenue structure for financial support of the Specify Project. We will undertake 'sustaining development' (maintenance and completion) of software for the Specify 7 data management platform. The Specify Project will continue to provide technical help desk support services, including outreach and training for U.S. research collections institutions using and adopting Specify for biological specimen data processing. The Specify Software Project web site is located at: http://specifysoftware.org.