(off-topic for Wikimedia, on-topic for access to knowledge in general)
The below news is sad, but not unusual, and increasingly common as
government budgets shrink. The NBII was a multi-year effort to
collect, curate and make accessible sources of biological data,
especially about the US. The site is archived here, among other
places; I don't know what happened to the data files that were hosted.
http://wayback.archive-it.org/2361/20120105233212/http://www.nbii.gov/porta…
Mostly, I think this is a reminder that what we do vis a vis
advocating for free licenses, reusable data, distributed curation etc.
is *important*. It's a safeguard against failure that's hard to
imagine in the short-term but almost inevitable in the long-term
(though in the world of knowledge projects, Wikimedia may --
ironically and surprisingly enough! -- end up being one of the most
resilient long-term platforms).
-- phoebe
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Frederick Stoss" <fstoss(a)buffalo.edu>
....
Please pass this on to other library associations and their
appropriate science and environmental units, especially SLA.
You may recall the modest clamor late last year with the shuttering of
the Website of the National Biological Information Infrastructure
(NBII) within the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which was terminated
on October 1, 2011, as a result of a Federal budget cut and
re-organization within the USGS. The final elimination of the NBII
Website takes place at the end of this month. Here is the official
wording about the termination of this once important and richly
populated data resource on the flora and fauna of the United States,
and detailed inventories of resources, services, publications and
tools related to biodiversity, ecology and related aspects of the US
biomes:
“In the President's budget for Fiscal Year 2012, the National
Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), a program under the U.S.
Geological Survey’s Biological Information Management and Delivery
Program, was terminated. As a result, the funding that facilitated the
NBII Node partnerships, as well as the development and maintenance of
databases, applications and systems, is no longer available. On
January 15, 2012, all NBII websites/applications with an *.nbii.gov
URL were removed from the internet.
“This website currently provides the latest information on
communications with partners, the disposition status of NBII Web
sites, data and applications, and general FAQs related to the NBII
Program’s termination. The NBII Program close-out will be complete on
September 30, 2012, and the
www.nbii.gov URL will be turned off on
that date. The termination information provided here will be made
available on the USGS FAQ site after September 30, 2012.”
Note those last two sentences:
“ The NBII Program close-out will be complete on September 30, 2012,
and the
www.nbii.gov URL will be turned off on that date. The
termination information provided here will be made available on the
USGS FAQ site after September 30, 2012.”