[Nhcoll-l] Your Feedback Please - Complete the VertNet Sustainability Survey

[David Bloom]

Hello Folks,


Please take a moment to complete the VertNet Sustainability
Survey<http://www.vertnet.org/feedback/sustainabilitysurvey.html>
(http://goo.gl/p6Y4ao).   It'll only take about 5 minutes of your time, but
it's 5 minutes that will assure the continued availability of the VertNet
network and all of the data it publishes. *It's up only for a short time!*

Why should I complete the survey?

We need to know what you think of us.  We want, in fact we need, to know
what you think about our services and products.  Without your feedback, we
can't achieve our goal to deliver a plan to sustain VertNet and it's
services into the future.  This includes everything we do: Dataset
Publication, Data Quality Improvement, Statistics and Reporting, Customer
Service, Training and Capacity Building, and the Data Portal.

More than three years ago the VertNet team proposed to NSF that we would
seek ways to address the challenge of sustainability in two ways.  VertNet
would:

(1) strive to reduce the costs necessary to maintain hardware, software,
and IT services to keep biodiversity data publicly accessible.

(2) engage the biodiversity and data user community in conversation to
explore existing and future strategies for the long-term sustainability of
digitization and data-sharing efforts.

So far, we've taken great strides to accomplish these two goals:

We've developed and implemented a data publishing procedure (using the
IPT<http://www.vertnet.org/join/ipt.html>)
and a portal architecture that reduces the cost needed to maintain the
network.  We believe our cloud-based infrastructure is a huge step toward
sustainability.  Despite these successes, it still takes our team time and
money to publish datasets and maintain the portal.  We've been engaged in a
serious effort to learn as much as we can about sustainability, funding
models, and how VertNet delivers its services to the community.  This
includes participation in an intensive sustainability training course,
Sustaining
Digital Collections<http://www.sr.ithaka.org/content/sustaining-digital-resources%E2%80%94training-course>,
developed by Ithaka S+R <http://www.sr.ithaka.org/>, and supported by
the Mellon
Foundation <http://www.mellon.org/> (we're right in middle of it, so more
on that when we're done).  We've also been accepted to participate in the
Ecological Society of America's Sustaining Biological Infrastructure
Workshop <http://esa.org/sbi/> in June, 2014.

But now we need your help.

If you value what we do, as well as how VertNet and other data portals
publish biodiversity data and provide services, please complete our
Sustainability
Survey <http://www.vertnet.org/feedback/sustainabilitysurvey.html>.

We thank you for your support.  We'll let you know what the community has
to say.

Best,
Dave and the VertNet Team

David Bloom
VertNet Coordinator
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
University of California, Berkeley
3101 Valley Life Sciences Building
Berkeley, CA 94720-3160

Phone: 510.643.1620
Fax: 510.643.8238

Email: dbloom at vertnet.org
Email: dbloom at berkeley.edu

URL: http://www.vertnet.org

VertNet Portals:
MaNIS: http://www.manisnet.org
HerpNET: http://www.herpnet.org
ORNIS: http://www.ornisnet.org
FishNet2: http://www.fishnet2.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20140414/c2a1564c/attachment.html