Introducing the Specify WorkBench: a stand-alone application for specimen data entry and a preview of the look and feel of Specify 6. The Specify 6 WorkBench is a friendly, innovative software tool for capturing and editing collections data. It can create and organize specimen information through keyboard data entry and through batch data import. Although the WorkBench is a specialized tool with a modest number of functions, it does some pretty sweet stuff. Would you like to georeference localities by simply highlighting specimen records and clicking a button? How about then visualizing those collection localities in Google Earth? Just click the Google Earth icon -- and enjoy the view. The Specify 6 Workbench operates identically on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X computers. Capable of being run completely from a USB memory drive, the WorkBench is the ultimate in portability and convenience for data entry in the field, for remote data entry in another museum, or for bringing your specimen data home for some after hours editing. Do you have photographs to catalog? Or pictures to associate with your specimen records? Or text to capture from specimen label images? The Specify WorkBench can help you find an image on your disk, link it to a data record, and then show you the image and its data, side-by-side. As a glimpse of capabilities to come, the Specify 6 WorkBench includes a small number of reports for simple data set analysis. The full version of Specify 6 will include a complete design and generation tool for customized reports and labels. The WorkBench can also map and import data from a Microsoft Excel or CSV file into Specify data fields. The application analyzes the column names in a spreadsheet and automatically associates them with the data fields used by Specify. After verifying the mappings, your data are used to create a WorkBench data set. Data sets in turn will be easily imported into the full version of Specify 6 when it is released. These capabilities demonstrate Specify Software Project’s technology vision of creating highly-usable, cross-platform database software for managing collections and mobilizing specimen data onto the Internet. Specify’s increasing utilization of web and grid services will bring Specify collections into closer integration with broader biological and environmental computing communities. Specify Software. We’re going to transform the nature of natural history collections.
The Specify Software Project is funded by U.S. National Science Foundation grant BIO/DBI #0446544. Specify Software Project, Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas, 1345 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS USA 66045 Phone: +1 (785) 864-4400, Email: specify@ku.edu, Website: www.specifysoftware.org