Collaborative Research: Sustaining Arctos as a Community of Practice and as a Collection Management Solution for Biodiversity Research & Education

An award is made to three partner institutions — the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Univ. California Berkeley), Museum of Southwestern Biology (Univ. New Mexico Albuquerque), and the Texas Advanced Computer Center (Univ.

Texas Austin) — to perform critical technical and infrastructure work that will establish a sustainable framework for Arctos, a database and collection management system. The Arctos community is a group of museum-based professionals representing natural and cultural history collections at over 40 institutions that share in the governance, design, maintenance, and development of Arctos.

A primary objective of the Arctos community is to make high quality data on biodiversity and cultural collections openly accessible and richly networked for multidisciplinary research and public understanding. This is accomplished through the Arctos online platform, which serves primary species and cultural data to national and international users. These data are used to advance knowledge in a diversity of disciplines and serve as an archival record for future generations.

Additionally, the Arctos platform is used as an educational tool where students access raw data to design original inquiries. The Arctos community is dedicated to rigorous management of collections and their data, as well as mentoring and training the next generation of curators, collection managers, and scientists.

Arctos views collections comprehensively and promotes linkages across biological, earth science, art, archival, and ethnographic collections to add value and relevance for education and research. For example, cultural and archival records often contribute temporal, ecological, and behavioral dimensions to biodiversity data from identifiable species components or observations.

Many museums curate more than one type of collection, and Arctos provides a comprehensive management solution integrating diverse disciplines. For the last 20-years, Arctos has practiced the concept of the ‘extended specimen network’. The richly annotated data in Arctos creates a web of knowledge with deep comprehensive relationships between cataloged records and all of their derived and associated data, and by using reliable published resources for globally shared information such as taxonomy, people names, and geography.

To sustain this community-driven infrastructure and resource, the Arctos database platform will complete migration to open-source technologies removing the need for costly software. Other benefits include stabilizing web services, query responses and delivery, spatial functionality, among other core features. The Arctos model of community engagement and development is attractive for collections of any size, including small institutions such as field stations that may lack IT infrastructure, because of its ease of cloud-based access, community mentorship, and enterprise-level platform at scaled pricing.

Project activities and results will be accessible on the Arctos websites (arctos.database.museum and arctosdb.org).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.