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

该奖项授予三个合作机构-脊椎动物学博物馆（加州伯克利大学）、西南生物学博物馆（新墨西哥州阿尔伯克基大学）和得克萨斯州高级计算机中心（得克萨斯州奥斯汀大学）-开展关键技术和基础设施工作，为Arctos建立一个可持续的框架，这是一个数据库和收藏管理系统。Arctos社区是一群以博物馆为基础的专业人士，代表40多个机构的自然和文化历史收藏品，这些机构共同参与Arctos的管理、设计、维护和开发。Arctos社区的一个主要目标是使生物多样性和文化收藏品的高质量数据公开访问，并为多学科研究和公众理解建立丰富的网络。这是通过Arctos在线平台完成的，该平台向国家和国际用户提供主要物种和文化数据。这些数据被用来推进各种学科的知识，并作为后代的档案记录。此外，Arctos平台被用作教育工具，学生可以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，以及指导和培训下一代策展人，藏品管理者和科学家。Arctos全面查看藏品，并促进生物，地球科学，艺术，档案和人种学收藏之间的联系，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时间，生态和行为方面的生物多样性数据，从可识别的物种组成部分或观察。许多博物馆都有不止一种类型的藏品，而Arctos提供了一个整合了不同学科的综合管理解决方案。在过去的20年里，Arctos实践了“扩展标本网络”的概念。Arctos中注释丰富的数据创建了一个知识网络，在编目记录及其所有衍生和关联数据之间具有深刻的综合关系，并使用可靠的已发布资源来获取全球共享的信息，如分类学，人名和地理。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，从而消除对昂贵软件的需求。其他好处包括稳定Web服务、查询响应和交付、空间功能以及其他核心功能。Arctos的社区参与和开发模式对于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，如现场站，因为它易于基于云的访问，社区指导和企业级平台。项目活动和结果将在Arctos网站（arctos.database.museum和arctosdb.org）上获得。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.