CONTROLLING DIGITAL DIVERSIFICATION: USING SPECIFY TO REPLACE MULTIPLE DATABASES WITH A SINGLE DATA STRUCTURE, IMPROVE THE QUALITY AND INTEROPERABILITY OF REPOSITORY ARCHIVAL DATASETS

University museums often serve as repositories for research collections from multiple departments, as well as from other universities without such facilities, and donated collections. Such collections provide particular challenges in terms of their long term conservation and future accessibility. Non-vertebrate Paleontology (NPL), of the Texas Natural Science Center (TNSC), houses an amalgam of research collections including a core of those collected during the late nineteenth century Geological Surveys of the State of Texas and continuing down to collections made by currently active researchers. Each individual collection enters with its own unique catalog system, which may not easily be subsumed into the master catalog system. This has resulted in a variety of different databases, mainly developed using MS Access, with varying degrees of relational structure, each valid for the task at hand but not consistent with efficient long-term data access, integrity or updating.

Specify, a product of a Kansas University research group sponsored in large part by the National Science Foundation, presented a feasible, supported, ‘free’ data structure into which to migrate our data, despite the application’s current inability to handle non-biological collections and only minimal coverage of geological parameters. TNSC’s Texas Natural History Collection already had migrated some of their data, the ichthyology collection, and was a positive, in-house model of success with limited operational funding for proprietary cataloging software. As a test the next large collection to enter NPL, a Holocene mussel collection, was directly catalogued into Specify 5 using “out of the box” forms. Upon release of Specify 6, we focused on customizing Specify 6 to best-fit our data sets and migrated all our data from Specify 5 into Specify 6.

Our long term goal is to combine all of our biological and paleontological data into a single Specify 6 database, providing for efficient validation, management, and archiving of that data. We continue to eliminate the plethora of databases, update taxonomies, edit multiple locality lists into combined and georeferenced standards, and attach supplemental materials including images and field notes. We shall continue to make these data publicly available through our website and data portals.