[Nhcoll-l] How does your museum govern shared biodiversity infrastructure?

[Yatskievych, George A]

Hi Nate,

Here at the University of Texas at Austin, we have a situation that likely is different from that of most other collections.  We have collections in fish, herps, insects/invertebrates, plants, and (in a different College) vertebrate and non-vertebrate (= everything else) fossils.  All of our collections use the Specify platform and we share a license for support.  Each of the collections has an independent instance of the software.  What we share is a single person who is data manager for each of those Specify instances. Our data manager, Tomislav Urban, is responsible for troubleshooting, communicating with the Specify folks, updating software, setting up and maintaining IPTs, customizing forms, etc.  He does this separately for each of the collections. He is actually employed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center associated with our university and different clients pay portions of his salary to claim part of his time.  Thus we have a single individual who is the living link between our various sets of collections data.

Be well,

GY

George Yatskievych, Ph.D.
Botanist, Curator: Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center, University of Texas at Austin
Main Bldg Rm 127, 110 Inner Campus Dr, Stop F0404, Austin, TX 78712-1711 U.S.A.
Tel. 512-471-5904; george.yatskievych at austin.utexas.edu<mailto:george.yatskievych at austin.utexas.edu>

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Shoobs, Nate
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2025 12:16 PM
To: Natural History Collections Listserv <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] How does your museum govern shared biodiversity infrastructure?

Hey all,
I'm curious to hear how other institutions manage collections data and shared digital infrastructure, like IPTs, database software, servers, etc.

Is your data and infrastructure all managed centrally by IT, with software decisions made centrally as well? Or does each collection determine what database software to use and pay its own way?
Do you have a committee of curators and CMs that makes decisions for the whole institution? Is there a curator just for informatics/databases?
How are disagreements about data stewardship mediated?

I'm very curious to hear what other institutions do, and how stakeholders feel about it. I know this can be a touchy subject, so feel free to respond to me off list if you like. On the flip side, if you have a system that works particularly well, let everyone hear about it!

Also -- if anyone knows of any literature or best practices docs RE data stewardship of this sort, send it along!
-Nate

--

[The Ohio State University]
Nathaniel F. Shoobs
Curator of Mollusks
College of Arts & Sciences Dept. of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Rd, Columbus, OH 43212
614-688-1342 (Office)
mbd.osu.edu/collections/invertebrates<https://mbd.osu.edu/collections/invertebrates>
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