Collaborative Research: BiSciCol Tracker: Towards a tagging and tracking infrastructure for biodiversity science collections

科学标本，通常在博物馆收藏中发现，作为一个不断扩大的信息阵列的锚，随着时间的推移而增长和变化。这些关于标本和标本所代表的物种的信息，通常在地理上分散在各个机构和独立的计算机系统中，因此很难访问或综合。该项目的目标是开发一个双向系统，将科学标本和生物学收藏品中与生物学有关的数据联系起来并进行跟踪，并使科学界和公众广泛使用这一系统。该系统将采用全球唯一标识符（GUID）来标记和更新与标本相关的信息，从而允许最终用户和收藏品之间进行通信。 该项目将提高非科学家和科学家的数据质量和数量，并将通过培训研讨会，暑期学生实习和社区BioBlitz增强积极参与使用社区。整合生物标本数据和相关信息的能力将使系统学，地理学和不断变化的物种分布相关的关键研究成为可能。这些反过来又对气候变化、土地利用的变化以及其他问题产生影响，这些问题对于理解过去、将变化置于历史背景中以及预测物种和环境的未来至关重要。该项目是一项为期10年的努力的一部分，旨在收集和动员与美国研究收藏中的生物标本有关的科学信息。该项目的图像和数字化数据将被纳入在线国家资源，如社区战略计划所述，可在http://digbiocol.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/digistratplanfinaldraft.pdf上查阅。

Scientific specimens, typically found in museum collections, serve as the anchor for an expanding array of information that grows and changes over time. This information, about specimens and the species that the specimens represent, is often scattered geographically across institutions and across independent computer systems, making it difficult to access or synthesize. The goal of this project is to develop a two-way system of linking and tracking scientific specimens and specimen-related data across biological collections, and to make this system widely available to the scientific community and the public. This system would employ globally unique identifiers, or GUIDs, to tag and update information associated with specimens, allowing communication between end users and collections. This project will improve data quality and quantity for non-scientists and scientists, and will actively engage use communities through training workshops, summer student internships, and community BioBlitz enhancements.The ability to integrate specimen data and associated information across biological collections will enable critical studies related to systematics, biogeography, and changing species distributions. These in turn have implications for climate change, changing land use, and other questions key to understanding the past, placing changes in an historical context, and predicting the future of species and environments. This project is part of a 10-year effort to digitize and mobilize the scientific information associated with biological specimens held in U.S. research collections. The images and digitized data from this project will be integrated into the online national resource as outlined in the community strategic plan available at http://digbiocol.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/digistratplanfinaldraft.pdf.