We will issue our minor update Friday afternoon to Specify 6.

Next week Andy Bentley of the Specify Staff will be leading a Specify 6 workshop at Utah State University hosted by Dr. Mary Barkworth. If you are in the neighborhood and are interested in attending contact Andy at abentley@ku.edu or Dr. Barkworth at mary@biology.usu.edu.

We continue to work on various fronts, we slowly building up a list of taxon authority files which can be imported into Specify from the Catalog of Life Project. The list is on the Download page. We will prioritize additional files based on user requests. In the coming weeks we will fully elaborate our process pipeline for converting Specify 5 databases to Specify 6. The Specify Converter, which will be an in-house tool will be a central piece of that. Specify staff will also customize Specify 6 data forms based on sites' Specify 5 forms and also develop customized layout templates for label and report print outputs. We met last week with the principals from the Morphbank and Morphster projects on a newly funded collaboration, to discuss ways to integrate Specify with Morphbank through web services, to give Specify users direct access to images in the Morphbank repository, and vice versa. We also hope to extend preliminary talks we have had with the Bar Coding of Life Project into requirements and use cases for a set of services linking the two projects. Our primary development activity over the next three months though, will be implementing the Specify 6 HTML and XML web interfaces to support institutional web sites, and uploading of data to disciplinary networks and to GBIF.