Costs of taxonomic programs

[Leonard Krishtalka]

At 10:01 AM 02/26/1996 -0600, Mary Barkworth wrote:

>And in answer to your question.  I have trouble envisioning a nomenclatural
>software package that would be worth 5 herbarium cabinets to me.  Cabinets
>are essential to the safety of specimens.  Loose the sepcimens and we have
>lost a part of the basis of our knowledge.  Have a specimen with an out of
>date or invalid name on a specimen?  It can be corrected.
>
>For an effective database system - that does not require a computer expert
>to amend it?  Interesting question.  How elaborate does it have to be?  The
>answer will vary depending on the size and function of the institution.  A
>few hundred dollars, assuming that it does what I need to do, can be used by
>students and others to generate labels, and does not require much of my time
>to maintain.

        The financial restrictions you and many of us are under in
undergraduate and graduate education are real, as you elegantly express.
Given fixed budgets, we have to fit expenditures to priorities, and often it
may come down to "5 herbarium cabinets" versus a taxonomic or  database
application, or any other choice that we can easily imagine as an example of
competing needs.   But, I am afraid that in the culture of specimen-based
systematics, the products that are designed for and dedicated to the
generation, synthesis and dissemination of knowledge from specimen/taxonomic
data are still thought of as poor relations, as adjuncts, rather than as
fundamental necessities in research and teaching for today and tomorrow for
the entire community.   The electronic  management/dissemination of
specimen-based information and its fusion with other environmental data sets
is a community necessity -- a priority that is equal to, if not higher than,
other components of the collection/systematic/taxonomic enterprise.
         A good example is the one you raise about a "specimen with an out
of date or invalid name...  It can be corrected".  Yes, it can, but that
corrected information and the existence of the specimen have much greater
value were it available on line to all who are involved in the biodiversity
enterprise, including students at other universities who are learning about
that taxon.  Better yet, that information would have even more
research/educational value if it were linked online to the data associated
with all other specimens (all taxa) in US herbaria and museums.   Just as
the Linnaean system (also just an information management system) makes us a
community of taxonomists, so informatics can, through the power of
information synthesis and sharing, make us a biological community of much
broader scope and impact in research and education.
__________________________________________
As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

        Walt Whitman (1819-92)


Leonard Krishtalka
Director                                          phone:  913/864-4540
Natural History Museum                     fax:       913/864-5335
The University of Kansas                    e-mail:  kris at falcon.cc.ukans.edu
Lawrence, KS 66045