[NHCOLL-L:2598] Re: Herbarium database

[Gordon Jarrell]

The Arctos database at the U of Alaska Museum of the North
has about 89,000 herbarium records among its total of
218,000 records.  Like the MVZ Model on which it is based,
Arctos rigorously embraces the real complexity of natural
history collections, and it interacts with other online
resources such as Berkeley Mapper and GenBank. Because it
is Web-based, it is platform independent and data can be
manipulated by priviliged users connecting from anywhere.

A clone of Arctos is nearly ready for public deployment at
the U of New Mexico's Museum of Southwestern Biology, and
our effort in Alaska continues to be in concert with MVZ.
Collaborative use and development of enterprise-caliber
Internet resources is ultimately a more productive and
efficient path than separate development and maintanence
of separate systems.

Arctos works.  We are putting more real-time information
about our specimens on the Web than anyone using Specify
or KE Emu.  We are hosting two small collections external
to our museum.  We are stretched thin with content
development, but we're happy to discuss the possibilities
of further hosting and co-development.

http://arctos.database.museum

-- 
Gordon Jarrell
U of A Museum of the North
University of Alaska
Fairbanks, AK 99775-6960 USA

(907) 474-6946


On Fri, March 18, 2005 4:46 am, Larry A Prather said:
> Hi Raney:
>
> I'm not sure if you can get a complete picture of what is most commonly
> used
> from this website, but there is a listing of what programs over 70
> herbaria
> are using, along with contact information and links to those that are
> online
> at this url: http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/botany/ncsc/type_links.htm
>
> My suggestion would be to have your colleague check out that website and
> contact people who are actually using these programs to learn the
> advantages
> and disadvantages. It would also be a good idea to find out what other
> regional herbaria are using (noting of course your "region" in Alaska will
> be substantially larger than most). I know that the Museum at U of A
> Fairbanks has much of their collection databased even though they are not
> on
> the list, so contacting them directly would be a good idea. I think Alan
> Batten <fnarb at aurora.uaf.edu> might be able to help.
>
> I know that Ke Emu is a good program but it is mighty expensive and many
> of
> us are leary of putting our valuable data in a "black box" software system
> from which it might be difficult to extract the data if and when Ke goes
> belly up. There are many other good programs that are free and that don't
> have this problem that you should definitely consider. Here at MSU we have
> a
> database of over 100,000 specimens in Specify and we're very pleased with
> the results (going online in the next couple of weeks, we hope!). If you
> want to know more about our experiences with Specify please contact me
> offlist.
>
> Best,
> Alan
>
>
>
> Alan Prather
> Michigan State University Herbarium
> Department of Plant Biology