The Essig Museum of Entomology is a part of a consortium of museums on the UC Berkeley campus, the Berkeley Natural History Museums. Since 1880 some famous entomologists (e.g. E.O. Essig, P.D. Hurd, J.A. Powell) built up Essig Museum and the collections of insects for teaching and research. In addition to California material, the museum houses a large collection of specimens from the northern Neotropics. Extensive fieldwork in Mexico by museum faculty and staff has enabled the assembly of a large, extremely important collection of specimens from that country. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
FishNet is a collaborative effort by natural history museums and other biodiversity institutions to establish a global network of Ichthyology collections. There is an open invitation for any institution with a fish collection to join. The current portal is an outgrowth of the original FishNet project with improvements in network stability, georeferencing capabilities, and technical support. Users are provided access to searchable, mappable and downloadable data that are cached on a regular basis from participating institutions who have published their data via the DiGIR or TAPIR protocols with a Darwin Core schema. FishNet is also one of four (along with MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS) vertebrate network portals that provide access to specimen collection records from around the world. These web portals, together, comprise VertNet and serve georeferenced, taxon-based data from 72 global institutions. ... [Information of the supplier]
With support from the National Science Foundation, seventeen North American institutions and their collaborators developed the Mammal Networked Information System. The original objectives of MaNIS were to 1) facilitate open access to combined specimen data from a web browser, 2) enhance the value of specimen collections, 3) conserve curatorial resources, and 4) use a design paradigm that can be easily adopted by other disciplines with similar needs. As an NSF-funded initiative, MaNIS has achieved these objectives while avoiding the need for long-term, external maintenance of the network and centralized data management. The MaNIS network provides access to mammal specimen records from a variety of museum collection databases via several equivalent portals (see the MaNIS Network Architecture diagram, below). A portal presents web pages from which a user can send requests for data and visualize the results. Requests for data pass through provider software installed on computers at the participating institutions. Individual institutions determine which data are made accessible to the public and format their data to agree with the community-determined standard (in this case the Darwin Core). Depending on their individual requirements, institutions may serve data to the public directly from their working collection databases, or they may serve data via a separate public database to which data are periodically migrated. These public databases may be within the same institutions (local snapshot), or they may be hosted at a collaborating institution (hosted snapshot). By participating in MaNIS, institutions also provide data via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). ... [Information of the supplier]
