COLLABORATIVE MODELS FOR PRESERVATION AND ACCESS

As digital data become more ubiquitous, and the reliance of researchers on digital forms of access to information becomes greater, the importance of digitizing collection catalogs and specimens, and providing interfaces to locate and retrieve this data, increases. However, many natural history and geological institutions lack the resources and/or expertise required to provision and manage digital infrastructure supporting large-scale preservation and access. The complex world of technology and the rapid developments in standardization and interoperability efforts, along with the significant technical infrastructure required to preserve and provide access to large quantities of digitized data, can present seemingly overwhelming obstacles for curatorial staff wishing to provide data online. We present a collaborative model in which research computing centers and curators can collectively surmount the challenges of technology and resources that may discourage digitization efforts. We discuss several discipline-specific and collection-specific collaborations in which the Texas Advanced Computing Center is providing technical infrastructure supporting data preservation, access, and analysis for natural history and other collections. We place these efforts in context with recent national-scale developments in cyberinfrastructure, including the NSF's Datanet and TeraGrid projects, and describe how these developments support a collaborative, multi-institutional approach to handling the challenges of research data in the 21st Century.