The Specify Software Project offers Specify 6 and allied applications for museum and herbarium research data processing. Specify 6 handles specimen information for computerizing collection holdings, for tracking specimen and tissue management transactions, and for mobilizing species occurrence data to the Internet. Specify runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers; it is free and open source licensed. Specify 6.0 was released on 10 April 2009.
Specify 6 has an intuitive user interface and customizable data forms aimed at streamlining routine collections data tasks while preparing and validating collection information for research analysis. Specify has numerous features including robust support for paleontological data, field notebooks, file attachments, GUIDs, hierarchical storage locations, data uploads through the Specify Workbench and Excel, repository agreements, accession logging, conservation treatments, collection object containers, along with numerous additional functions. Specify 6 supports the use of record sets for various types of processing, such as georeferencing with GEOLocate, label and report printing, and importing and exporting, and Specify's data model now handles all institutional collections within a single database for simplified administration.
Here are some samples of Specify 6's look and feel:
Specify 6 is an integration platform which will transform biological collections computing. Its layered software architecture is designed for embedding web services and functional extensions through plug-ins. With its open source model, we invite software development collaborations to extend Specify to bring species voucher and cataloged observation data to broader research initiatives in the environmental sciences.
Non-profit U.S. research collections are eligible for Project helpdesk, configuration and data conversion services. With Specify, we look forward to increasing the research impact of your institution's investment in biodiversity collection curation and data management.
Contact us if we can help: Specify Project Helpdesk tel: +1 785-864-4400 (U.S. Central Time Zone, GMT - 6), E-mail: specify@ku.edu
(The Specify 5 web site is now located at: specify5.specifysoftware.org.)