Overview
The Consortium
The Specify Collections Consortium (SCC) is an international, non-profit, membership organization of biological museums, universities and government agencies working together to advance computerization within biodiversity research collections. The SCC does this by providing open-source software platforms and technical services for specimen data digitization and collection management.
As of November 2024, the Specify Collections Consortium comprises 142-member institutions from 24 countries that collectively use Specify software in 451 research collections. (The SCC member list is available on our web site, http://www.specifysoftware.org/members.) The Consortium is financially and legally administered as a U.S. 501(c)3 non-profit organization under the Office of Research of the University of Kansas, a U.S. public research university. Prior to 2018, the Specify initiative was funded by grants for 20+ years by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Reaching back to its roots in 1987, the Consortium represents 36 years of biodiversity collection community engagement with collections software and technical support.
The Consortium’s financial health has been strong since we transformed the Specify initiative to an institution membership organization in 2018. Membership has grown an average of 14% per year; in 2024 the SCC’s membership revenue will reach $486,000 USD. The University of Kansas provides additional salary support to the Consortium in the amount of $186,000 per year. Supplemental revenue comes from grants. In 2024, with $192,000 in grant funding from the Swiss Academy of Sciences SwissCollNet Program, and in collaboration with several Swiss museums of natural history, we are extending Specify to the geosciences for managing research collections of rocks, minerals, gems, and meteorites. The extension will be available as of the first quarter of 2025.
Expertise and Services
The SCC office, acting as home base for its software engineers and support staff, is located in the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Kansas in Lawrence Kansas. Staff includes the Director (Dr. J.H. Beach), three professional software engineers, two professional technical support staff, four junior undergraduate software engineers, and three undergraduate software quality testers.
With member fulfillment and technical services, the SCC provides timely responses to help desk requests. We also operate a Specify Community Forum site that serves as a hub for Specify member feedback and discussion (http://discourse.specifysoftware.org). In addition to producing new capabilities in regular Specify software releases and fixing bugs in minor updates, we also work with SCC member collections to migrate historical data sets and to resolve technical or data issues that arise. We have a deep technical understanding of the research and curatorial goals of collections scientists and of the data management tasks that are part of museum operations. Our professional software engineering and support staff have decades of experience working with collections of all biological disciplines, sample preparation types and collection work protocols.
Why use Specify Software?
We understand biological collections and their data, A-to-Z and top-to-bottom. No team on the planet has worked with more collections’ data or converted more legacy database systems to a modern relational database design than we have. The SCC was born in the biological collections community, and we have been embedded and fully-engaged with research collections for decades.
Since the mid-1990s our approach to the semantics, structure, and logical processing of biological collections data has met the needs of hundreds of collections curators and researchers, worldwide. One ingredient for our long-term success, and ongoing utility of Specify for biological collections, lies in the design of Specify’s layered software architecture. Specify has a highly-adaptable, collection-centric design that allows interface forms, components, languages, and even embedded help tips to be customized for each collection. By using configuration preferences and settings, Specify’s data forms can be optimized around a collection’s standard protocols without modifying Specify’s codebase or database design.
Our flagship software platform, Specify 7, combines the interface design components and data management foundation we supported for over 15 years in Specify 6, our Java thick-client platform, with the efficiency and ease-of-use of web-based data access and cloud computing. The Specify 7 web application uses the same data forms layout language as Specify 6, so user interface customizations made in one platform are mirrored in the other. Also because Specify 6 and Specify 7 use the same database schema in a MySQL or MariaDB database, they can be run simultaneously within a biological collection. By providing a clear migration path to the web, Specify 7 has helped transition Specify 6 collections to cloud computing. Specify 7 is also a great starting platform for institutions that prefer to avoid managing server hardware or workstation software installation, with the added benefit of ubiquitous web browser access. Specify 7 server software is supported on generic Linux servers, which provides an option to consider a cloud hosted deployment to handle server administration, security management, and data backup. Institutions can use their own hosting provider or the SCC’s Specify Cloud service (https://www.specifysoftware.org/products/cloud/) to host their collection databases.
Moving forward
The Specify team is constantly working on enhancing the user experience by revising code and adding new features. The 2025 Work Program for development and outreach can be found on our Forum (https://discourse.specifysoftware.org/t/2025-scc-work-program/2273). Development priorities are established through feedback and discussion with our Board of Members, User Advisory Committee, and Technology Advisory Committee, as well as our interactions with our members via email, meetings, and our member Forum.
Working with New Members
Specify staff includes an Implementation Officer and Technical Support Officer who will take the lead in analyzing data and workflow requirements, as well as work with customer staff to discuss implementation options to decide on a path forward as well as a timeline for the decided path. The discussions may involve weekly or monthly meetings between us and the customers, site visits potentially on both sides, and training on Specify software.
We have a long history of working with organizations to onboard them into Specify software. We have worked with collections of all sizes from a few hundred specimens to around a billion (Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans), just about every natural history discipline, different collection types (preserved specimen, lots, DNA/tissue, etc.), different complexities from a single collection to consortia with dozens of institutions each with multiple disciplines.
We have also worked with several consortia of institutions with natural history and geology collections to bring their data into Specify, including the Denmark Consortia of Natural History Collections, the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). We are also currently working with a Greek Consortia of Natural History Collections to obtain a grant to bring their institutions’ data into Specify. We can not only leverage that experience in our discussions and plans, we have a close relationship with representatives from those consortia who we can reference or meet with to come to the most effective plan for Norway’s data migration.
We have completed or are currently working with the above Consortia to plan how they structured their data, each defining optimal work protocols and methods according to their workflow, institutional independence, and support level. Decisions on how they structured collection data in their institutional network had downstream effects on how their information was imported and standardized, all of which we mapped out for them and assisted, including followup visits and constant interactions. All of the consortia we’ve worked with are also on our Board of Members, so they are active participants in deciding the future of our development and of the SCC as a whole.