Specify Project staff are mostly back from summer vacation and we are preparing and testing our next incremental release, Specify 6.0.8. We are also working on the development of Specify 6.1, which will be our first major update since Specify 6 was released in April 2009. Specify 6.1 will ship with the GBIF Internet Publishing Toolkit (IPT) for easy creation of an HTML web site and a TAPIR XML data provider to serve Specify data to collection community portals. Engineering is finishing a new user interface for mapping Specify data elements to Darwin Core or any other desired schema. The customized IPT package and user interface software for field mapping will be released for internal testing within a week or two. Specify 6.1 is scheduled to be released on the web site at the end of August, and we will soon announce some exciting, productivity enhancements included in it. Specify 6.1 will also be available through Specify's automatic update mechanism for registered workstations.

The current release of Specify, 6.0.7, has an intermittent problem in the installer application for Mac OS X. On some Macs the installer fails to run, so we have temporarily removed it from the Download page. Our next release, 6.0.8, fixes the issue. We plan to release it on, or near, July 7th.

The Specify Converter, a data analyst tool for mapping and moving Specify 5 data into 6, will be sent to Specify Specialist partners this week.

Specify Evangelist Andrew Bentley will be attending the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNCH) this coming week in Leiden. Be sure to catch him if you are attending and have questions about Specify 6. Andy is the Oracle of Specify information.

Specify 5 users who are ready to consider migrating data to Specify 6, should contact us at 785-864-4400 or at specify@ku.edu, to get on the list for conversions. The Specify Help Desk staff will coordinate schedules and tasks in a first-in, first-out (FIFO) queue. We do not do GIGO.

The Specify Project is submitting a funding renewal proposal to the US National Science Foundation in early August for four more years of support. We are sending out e-mail requests to registered Specify collections this week to verify contact and collection information, and Specify usage level. Your information is vitally important to our funding renewal request; please take 15 minutes to respond by e-mail to help us help you. Many thanks!