TY - JOUR
T1 - From card catalogs to computers
T2 - Databases in vertebrate paleontology
AU - Uhen, Mark D.
AU - Barnosky, Anthony D.
AU - Bills, Brian
AU - Blois, Jessica
AU - Carrano, Matthew T.
AU - Carrasco, Marc A.
AU - Erickson, Gregory M.
AU - Eronen, Jussi T.
AU - Fortelius, Mikael
AU - Graham, Russell W.
AU - Grimm, Eric C.
AU - Oleary, Maureen A.
AU - Mast, Austin
AU - Piel, William H.
AU - Polly, P. David
AU - Säilä, Laura K.
N1 - Funding Information:
Governance and Funding—As a small database, the Polyglot Paleontologist is managed by a single individual and decisions about its governance are ad hoc. It requires no regular funding but receives infrastructural support from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The site has also been supported by a Smithsonian Seidell Grant (for the dissemination of previously published scientific works).
Funding Information:
MorphoBank has been supported by multiple grants from the NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences and Division of Environmental Biology, as well as grants from NESCent (National Evolutionary Synthesis Center) and support from the American Museum of Natural History.
Funding Information:
Collections databases are structured around lists of specimens and the associated information cataloged in museum collections. They come in three basic varieties. First, many institutions have created custom databases built on commercially available database platforms. Second, many institutions use broadly available freeware such as Specify, which was developed with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) at the University of Kansas (specifysoftware.org). Third, many institutions use commercially available products such as KE EMu (www.kesoftware.com) or PastPerfect (www.museumsoftware.com). No matter what variety of collections database is deployed, all of these classes are customizable to be as complex or as simple as is necessary.
PY - 2013/1/1
Y1 - 2013/1/1
N2 - Data, whether images, measurements, counts, occurrences, or character codings, are a cornerstone of vertebrate paleontology. Every published paper, master's thesis, and doctoral dissertation relies on these data to document patterns and processes in evolution, ecology, taphonomy, geography, geologic time, and functional morphology, to name just a few. In turn, the vertebrate paleontology community relies on published data in order to reproduce and verify others work, as well as to expand upon published analyses in new ways without having to reconstitute data sets that have been used by earlier authors and to accurately preserve data for future generations of researchers. Here, we review several databases that are of interest to vertebrate paleontologists and strongly advocate for more deposition of basic research data in publicly accessible databases by vertebrate paleontologists.
AB - Data, whether images, measurements, counts, occurrences, or character codings, are a cornerstone of vertebrate paleontology. Every published paper, master's thesis, and doctoral dissertation relies on these data to document patterns and processes in evolution, ecology, taphonomy, geography, geologic time, and functional morphology, to name just a few. In turn, the vertebrate paleontology community relies on published data in order to reproduce and verify others work, as well as to expand upon published analyses in new ways without having to reconstitute data sets that have been used by earlier authors and to accurately preserve data for future generations of researchers. Here, we review several databases that are of interest to vertebrate paleontologists and strongly advocate for more deposition of basic research data in publicly accessible databases by vertebrate paleontologists.
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U2 - 10.1080/02724634.2012.716114
DO - 10.1080/02724634.2012.716114
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84872569143
SN - 0272-4634
VL - 33
SP - 13
EP - 28
JO - Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
JF - Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
IS - 1
ER -