[Taxacom] Specify 6 Released

[Beach, James H]

Specify 6 is an integration platform which will transform biological
collections computing.

After more than 12 software developer years of design and engineering
and over two million US dollars of investment, the Specify Software
Project is delighted to announce the availability of Specify 6 for
Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux desktops. 

Specify's pluggable architecture is designed for adding web service
links and functional extensions. With our open source model, we look
forward to community software development collaborations to extend
Specify to bring specimen data to broader computational research and
networking initiatives in the environmental sciences.

Specify 6, written in Java, is a database platform for museums and
herbaria which processes specimen information for computerizing
holdings, managing collection management transactions, and for
mobilizing species occurrence data to the web. Specify is free and open
source licensed under a GPL. Downloadable installation packages for all
three desktop flavors are now available from the web site. 

Specify 6 has an intuitive, highly-usable user interface and many new
capabilities aimed at streamlining routine collections data tasks while
preparing and validating collection information for biodiversity
community networks. Specify 6 has numerous enhancements over Specify
5.x, including support for using record sets as subsets of the complete
catalog for various types of processing, such as: online georeferencing,
label and report production, and importing and exporting records.
Specify 6's scope has been enlarged to provide robust support for
multiple disciplinary collections within a single database,
paleontological data, field notebook information, file attachments,
GUIDs, hierarchical storage locations, data entry and uploads through
the Specify Workbench and Excel, collecting trip data, repository
agreements, accession logging, conservation treatments, collection
object containers, and many additional enhancements. Specify's data
entry forms are highly-customizable, and Specify label and report
generator can meet exacting needs for print output.

Non-profit U.S. research collections are eligible for our helpdesk,
configuration and data conversion services thanks to support from the
U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Biological Infrastructure.
We look forward to working with you to increase the research impact of
your institution's investment in biodiversity collection curation and
specimen data management.

The Specify web site is located at: www.specifysoftware.org.


Specify Software Project Staff


Post Mortem, we sort 'em.