Collaborative Research: Sustaining Arctos as a Community of Practice and as a Collection Management Solution for Biodiversity Research & Education

三个伙伴机构--脊椎动物博物馆(Univ.加州大学伯克利分校)，西南生物博物馆(大学新墨西哥州阿尔伯克基)和德克萨斯高级计算机中心(大学德州奥斯汀)-执行关键的技术和基础设施工作，为Arctos、数据库和集合管理系统建立一个可持续的框架。Arctos社区是一群以博物馆为基础的专业人士，代表着40多个机构的自然和文化历史藏品，参与Arctos的治理、设计、维护和开发。Arctos社区的主要目标是使关于生物多样性和文化收藏的高质量数据公开可用，并建立丰富的网络，以供多学科研究和公众理解。这是通过Arctos在线平台实现的，该平台向国内和国际用户提供初级物种和文化数据。这些数据被用来促进不同学科的知识，并作为后代的档案记录。此外，Arctos平台还被用作教育工具，学生可以通过访问原始数据来设计原始查询。Arctos社区致力于严格管理藏品及其数据，并指导和培训下一代馆长、藏品管理者和科学家。Arctos全面看待藏品，促进生物、地球科学、艺术、档案和人种学藏品之间的联系，为教育和研究增加价值和相关性。例如，文化和档案记录往往有助于从可识别的物种成分或观察中获得生物多样性数据的时间、生态和行为维度。许多博物馆管理不止一种类型的藏品，Arctos提供了整合不同学科的综合管理解决方案。在过去的20年里，Arctos一直在实践“扩展样本网络”的概念。Arctos中注释丰富的数据创建了一个知识网络，在编目的记录及其所有派生和关联数据之间具有深刻的全面关系，并使用可靠的已发布资源来获取全球共享的信息，如分类法、人名和地理位置。为了维持这种社区驱动的基础设施和资源，Arctos数据库平台将完成向开源技术的迁移，消除了对昂贵软件的需求。其他好处包括稳定网络服务、查询响应和传递、空间功能以及其他核心功能。Arctos的社区参与和开发模式对任何规模的集合都很有吸引力，包括可能缺乏IT基础设施的小型机构，因为它易于基于云的访问、社区指导和规模化定价的企业级平台。项目活动和结果将在Arctos网站(arctos.datase.Museum和arctosdb.org)上获得。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

An award is made to three partner institutions — the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Univ. California Berkeley), Museum of Southwestern Biology (Univ. New Mexico Albuquerque), and the Texas Advanced Computer Center (Univ. Texas Austin) — to perform critical technical and infrastructure work that will establish a sustainable framework for Arctos, a database and collection management system. The Arctos community is a group of museum-based professionals representing natural and cultural history collections at over 40 institutions that share in the governance, design, maintenance, and development of Arctos. A primary objective of the Arctos community is to make high quality data on biodiversity and cultural collections openly accessible and richly networked for multidisciplinary research and public understanding. This is accomplished through the Arctos online platform, which serves primary species and cultural data to national and international users. These data are used to advance knowledge in a diversity of disciplines and serve as an archival record for future generations. Additionally, the Arctos platform is used as an educational tool where students access raw data to design original inquiries. The Arctos community is dedicated to rigorous management of collections and their data, as well as mentoring and training the next generation of curators, collection managers, and scientists.Arctos views collections comprehensively and promotes linkages across biological, earth science, art, archival, and ethnographic collections to add value and relevance for education and research. For example, cultural and archival records often contribute temporal, ecological, and behavioral dimensions to biodiversity data from identifiable species components or observations. Many museums curate more than one type of collection, and Arctos provides a comprehensive management solution integrating diverse disciplines. For the last 20 years, Arctos has practiced the concept of the ‘extended specimen network’. The richly annotated data in Arctos creates a web of knowledge with deep comprehensive relationships between cataloged records and all of their derived and associated data, and by using reliable published resources for globally shared information such as taxonomy, people names, and geography. To sustain this community-driven infrastructure and resource, the Arctos database platform will complete migration to open-source technologies removing the need for costly software. Other benefits include stabilizing web services, query responses and delivery, spatial functionality, among other core features. The Arctos model of community engagement and development is attractive for collections of any size, including small institutions such as field stations that may lack IT infrastructure, because of its ease of cloud-based access, community mentorship, and enterprise-level platform at scaled pricing. Project activities and results will be accessible on the Arctos websites (arctos.database.museum and arctosdb.org).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.