Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference

For 30 years, the Specify Project and its predecessor the MUSE Project operated on grant funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. In retrospect, the NSF and its reviewers deserve rich acknowledgement for their decades-long commitment to the extended incubation of these collection informatics initiatives. At the time though, managing and sustaining a collections cyberinfrastructure on 3-year competitive grants was challenging, and too probabilistic for comfort or complacency.

While being supported by NSF, software development and helpdesk support were our highest daily priorities. Community or open-source organization building was of relatively low importance as the only actual stakeholder in a financial sense was the NSF. Proposal reviewers could be considered indirect stakeholders but with no financial skin in the game.

Over the years and through the grant cycles, motivation to reduce our dependency on NSF ebbed and flowed. In 2017, we were again encouraged by NSF to look for additional revenue sources and a business model based on a demonstration of our value to collections institutions. Then, in a serendipitous discovery process we explored alternate organizational and economic models. That exploration culminated with the establishment of the Specify Collections Consortium (SCC) in 2018. Now in its sixth year, the SCC has flourished into an international community of over 105 institutional stakeholder museums.

The transformation to a self-sustaining, research community organization has made Specify more responsive to its stakeholders. It has caused us to focus on collaborative governance structure and to improve the quality of our technical methods, software products, community engagement, and support services.