IMPLEMENTING SPECIFY 6 IN THE INVERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY COLLECTION AT THE FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

The Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) Invertebrate Paleontology collection began transitioning to the Specify 6 database platform from a custom Access Database in October, 2013. Specify, an open-source database platform, is designed to manage museum and herbarium collection and research information. It enables a collection to track specimen data, link images and documents to specimen records, publish data online (e.g., iDigbio and GBIF), as well as keep track of and update relevant taxonomic information. Although several smaller collections at the FLMNH, including Ichthyology, Herpetology, Mammology, and Paleobotany have nearly completed or completed the transition to Specify, the FLMNH Invertebrate Paleontology collection is the largest FLMNH collection (number of specimen lots) to make the switch to the new system, with 251,000 cataloged lots at the time of migration. The Ichthyology collection was the second largest, with 221,000 cataloged lots at the time of migration. The collection’s size, as well as the nature of its data as a paleontological collection, presented unique challenges throughout the conversion to using Specify full-time. Our goal is to highlight some of those challenges, explain the ways we have worked with FLMNH’s Office of Museum Technology and the Specify team to overcome them, and illustrate Specify’s strengths as a means to digitize, store, and disseminate data. Using the lessons we have learned, we will create a guide for future users of the Specify database in the FLMNH Invertebrate Paleontology collection, in order to help streamline the digitization of data.