[Wikimedia-l] OT / Fwd: [STS-L] FINAL TERMINATION OF THE NBII on September 30, 2012

[George Herbert]

Query - would making this on-topic for the Foundation be appropriate?

I.e., is the Foundation perhaps hosting and curating these apps and
data a reasonable project for us to take on?  Even if it took some
time to return some of the apps to usable, bringing over the data sets
and software to an archival location and offering to host turning it
back on again if the prior researchers or another subject matter
expert stepped up to help with that seems possible.


-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 1:01 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> (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/portal/server.pt/community/nbii_home/236
>
> 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 at 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.”
>
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-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com