Those dusty specimens stored in museums are about to get a rocket boost into cyberspace. A new database will put an enormous data trove at researchers' fingertips, paving the way for studies on everything from bird migrations to saving rare species.
M
Those dusty specimens stored in museums are about to get a rocket boost into cyberspace. A new database will put an enormous data trove at researchers' fingertips, paving the way for studies on everything from bird migrations to saving rare species.
Museum collections contain centuries worth of facts and figures on specimens. But culling these data usually means weeks or months pestering curators and searching scattered records. To speed up the process, David Vieglais of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum in Lawrence developed a software program called The Species Analyst  that was just released as a prototype on the Web. The program sends a query to six museums' online collections.* It then pools the data it gets back and, in seconds, produces a world map showing where the plant or animal has been found, along with a table that lists each specimen in the museums' collections and th