1. Introduction 

The contract specifies the following task:  To undertake a survey of existing publicly 

distributed collection management and data capture software solutions that are currently 

being used by the world's Natural History Collections

1

 to capture, organize and manage 

specimen based data.  The deliverable was defined as  A report and associated 

spreadsheet documenting the results of the survey by listing the available digitization 

software and documenting its 

Availability and cost  

Any documented limitations to scalability 

Any computing platform limitations or specialization 

Any specialization by taxonomic group 

Estimate of size and distribution of user base 

Appropriate contact information including a URL if available. 

Data import capabilities and/or limitations 

Data export capabilities and/or limitations  

Limitations 

An important limitation build into the contract was the restriction to software  available 

commercially or free of charge, with some degree of support, and in use by at least two 

institutes or collections.  One of us (Berendsohn) has been editing a simple link 

collection to such collection software for some years, under the auspices of the 

Taxonomic Databases Working Group's subgroup on accession data. We are thus very 

conscious of the limitations of our approach. Many more software products exist in the 

world's Natural History Collections, some of which may be more sophisticated and/or 

usable than those here investigated. However, most of these do not provide resources for 

the support of external users. Especially in non English speaking nations we did probably 

miss quite a few existing solutions. However, to our best knowledge we do cover those 

products that have expressed an intention to offer some support on an international level.  

Approach 

We first identified relevant software products in our TDWG / BioCISE site on  Software 

for Biological Collection Management  

http://www.bgbm.org/TDWG/acc/Software.htm

. 

An intensive search on the World Wide Web revealed a few additional candidates and 

served to update links.  

Available information was extracted from the site in accordance with the questions posed 

in the contract, adding sources for user information and database model. The results were 

entered in the questionnaire and send by email to the respective contact person, asking for 

verification and improvement of the information (see appendix A).  

1

For the purposes of this contract, `Natural History Collection' is defined as permanently preserved (non living) 

collections of extant species including botanical and vertebrate and invertebrate zoological collections.

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