Arctos in 10 minutes!
Channel: ARCTOS
Date: 18/10/2022

Arctos: A Collaborative Scalable Solution

Presented by Emily Braker at BioDigiCon 2022 (iDigBio, virtual summit September 28, 2022)

Arctos (arctosdb.org) is a leader in providing museums both large and small with community-driven solutions to publishing, managing, linking, and improving collections data. Pioneered in 1999 and securely hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Arctos is a web-based CMS and data portal that serves 4.4 million biodiversity and cultural records from over 290 member collections with nearly 886,000 associated media objects (images, audio, CT scans, documents). The online interface supports data entry and editing and batch updates, with integrated tools for transaction and permit management, geocoding and mapping, citation and object tracking, summarizing impact statistics, and automated IPT publishing. Arctos strives for superior data quality through its highly-normalized model with community-sourced controlled vocabularies and authorities. Shared standardized data has led to innovative ways of relating objects within or between collections (e.g., predator-prey and host-parasite relationships), promoting dynamic data exploration and interdisciplinary research. Arctos also leverages external resources to enhance capabilities and connectivity to realize the Digital Extended Specimen concept, including Barcode of Life, GBIF, GenBank, Global Biotic Interactions, Global Genome Biodiversity Network, Global Names, iDigBio, IsoBank, iNaturalist, MorphoSource, World Register of Marine Species, and VertNet. Furthermore, Arctos is a community of museum professionals who collaborate on best practices and work together to improve data richness and expand functionality, sharing equally in its development through participation in the Arctos Working Group. By connecting natural and cultural history collections within a digital ecosystem and promoting high quality data, Arctos enables data access and use to ultimately empower research, education, and conservation.