Welcome to Specify 6

The Specify Software Project is delighted to announce the availability of Specify 6, a museum and herbarium collections data management system for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Specify 6 processes specimen information for computerizing holdings, for tracking collection management transactions, and for mobilizing species occurrence data to the internet. Specify is free and open source licensed.

Specify 6 has an intuitive user interface and highly-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 refreshing, sublime look and feel:

    Specify 6's look and feel is identical on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Specify 6 is an integration platform which will transform biological collections computing. Its pluggable architecture is designed for adding web service links and functional extensions. With its open source model, we invite software development collaborations to extend Specify to bring species voucher data to broader research initiatives in the environmental sciences.

Non-profit U.S. research collections are eligible for our 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.)