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

三家合作机构——脊椎动物动物学博物馆（加州大学伯克利分校）、西南生物博物馆（新墨西哥大学阿尔伯克基分校）和德克萨斯高级计算机中心（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）——将获得一份合同，执行关键的技术和基础设施工作，为Arctos建立一个可持续的框架，一个数据库和收集管理系统。Arctos社区是一个以博物馆为基础的专业团体，代表着40多个机构的自然和文化历史收藏品，他们分享Arctos的管理、设计、维护和开发。Arctos社区的一个主要目标是为多学科研究和公众理解提供高质量的生物多样性和文化收藏数据，并使其公开可及。这是通过Arctos在线平台完成的，该平台为国内和国际用户提供主要物种和文化数据。这些数据用于推进学科多样性的知识，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社区致力于馆藏及其数据的严格管理，并指导和培训下一代策展人、馆藏管理人员和科学家。Arctos全面地看待藏品，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从时间、生态和行为方面为可识别的物种组成部分或观察提供生物多样性数据。许多博物馆都有不止一种类型的藏品，而Arctos提供了一个综合管理解决方案，整合了不同的学科。在过去的20年里，Arctos一直在实践“扩展标本网络”的概念。Arctos中丰富的注释数据创建了一个知识网络，在编目记录及其所有派生和相关数据之间建立了深入全面的关系，并通过使用可靠的发布资源来获取全球共享的信息，如分类法、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特性。Arctos的社区参与和发展模式对任何规模的集合都很有吸引力，包括小型机构，如可能缺乏IT基础设施的现场站，因为它易于基于云的访问，社区指导和企业级平台的规模定价。项目活动和结果可以在Arctos网站（Arctos .数据库）上访问。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，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.