Biodiversity Information Projects of the World

Arctos

Project Website

http://arctos.database.museum

Project Description

Arctos is a collaborative effort to deliver full database services to museum collections using the Internet. The University of Alaska Museum (UAM - Fairbanks) and the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB - Albuquerque) share a server with several smaller collections. The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ - Berkeley) and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ - Harvard) each operate separate servers, but all programming is carefully coordinated.

Contact

Gordon Jarrell

University of Alaska Museum

Project Type

Data Provider

Project Language

English

Project Start Date

01-Jan-1998

Project End Date

31-Dec-2010

Key Inputs

The Arctos data model is based on the "MVZ Model" which is approximately descended from the ASC (now NSCA) Model. Funding has come from several grants to MVZ and UAM from NSF. In-house support from the major participants has also been substantial.

Key Infrastructure

Exhaustive specimen data can be associated with scientific results in the form of publications and projects. Specimen records can be cross-linked to records in GenBank and MorphBank. Bounding boxes within scanned images of field notes can be associated with various data elements, especially cataloged items.

Key Technologies

Cold Fusion running over Oracle 10g.

Key Processes

Operators can catalog specimens, generate labels, conduct transactions, track barcoded objects, and associate specimen records with publications. Georeferenced records can be displayed on BerkeleyMapper.

Geographic Scope

Global - The collections using Arctos are all North American, but holdings from these collections are from all over the World.

Taxonomic Scope

All - As yet, there is no paleontological material and no prokaryotes. Otherwise, the scope is broad and growing broader.

Comments

Record Status

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