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"Museum collections are an effective means of mapping species distributions by plotting what was collected when and where, and thus they provide another means to understand changes in our environment."
-- Jodi Brown, CCBER intern.
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Jim Markham
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Specify is a research software application, database, and network interface for biological collections information. It manages specimen data including descriptions of collecting locations, participants and determination histories as well as information about collections transactions such as loans, exchanges, accessions and gifts (http://specifysoftware.org/content/welcome-specify-6). Originally developed by the National Science Foundation for fish collections, it is highly customizable and can be configured for any biological collection. It is available at no cost to institutions housing biological collections. Specify version 6.0 was released in April 2009. It has just been installed here at CCBER, and testing of the new version is underway.
In advance of the release of Specify 6.0, the Specify Workbench was developed for interim entry and storage of data which could be uploaded into the main Specify database later. In December 2007 Specify Workbench was installed on the CCBER Herbarium computer for testing, and has been used by Dr. Jim Markham to catalog algae specimens since January 2008.
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| Algae specimens collected by Markham: Ahnfeltia concinna (l) and Kallymenia oblongifructa (r). |
Markham collected marine algae extensively from 1961 to 1974, mostly from Alaska to Oregon, but also in Europe, Chile, and elsewhere. After 1964, under an agreement with the University of British Columbia, all algae collected by Markham were donated to UBC, where they were pressed, labeled, and accessioned into the UBC Algal Herbarium. Markham received duplicate herbarium specimens of all algae collected. These UBC duplicates, together with algae collected outside this time period, constitute the Markham Algal Collection that was donated to the CCBER Algal Herbarium in 1987. |
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