Hello All (especially you natural sciences and biodiversity folks),

Please take a moment to complete the VertNet Sustainability Survey (http://goo.gl/p6Y4ao).   It’ll only take about 5 minutes of your time, but it’s 5 minutes that will assure the continued availability of the VertNet network and all of the data it publishes. It's up only for a short time!

Why should I complete the survey?

We need to know what you think of us.  We want, in fact we need, to know what you think about our services and products.  Without your feedback, we can’t achieve our goal to deliver a plan to sustain VertNet and it’s services into the future.  This includes everything we do: Dataset Publication, Data Quality Improvement, Statistics and Reporting, Customer Service, Training and Capacity Building, and the Data Portal.

More than three years ago the VertNet team proposed to NSF that we would seek ways to address the challenge of sustainability in two ways.  VertNet would:

(1) strive to reduce the costs necessary to maintain hardware, software, and IT services to keep biodiversity data publicly accessible.

(2) engage the biodiversity and data user community in conversation to explore existing and future strategies for the long-term sustainability of digitization and data-sharing efforts.

So far, we’ve taken great strides to accomplish these two goals:

We’ve developed and implemented a data publishing procedure (using the IPT) and a portal architecture that reduces the cost needed to maintain the network.  We believe our cloud-based infrastructure is a huge step toward sustainability.  Despite these successes, it still takes our team time and money to publish datasets and maintain the portal.  We’ve been engaged in a serious effort to learn as much as we can about sustainability, funding models, and how VertNet delivers its services to the community.  This includes participation in an intensive sustainability training course, Sustaining Digital Collections, developed by Ithaka S+R, and supported by the Mellon Foundation (we’re right in middle of it, so more on that when we’re done).  We’ve also been accepted to participate in the Ecological Society of America’s Sustaining Biological Infrastructure Workshop in June, 2014.

But now we need your help.

If you value what we do, as well as how VertNet and other data portals publish biodiversity data and provide services, please complete our Sustainability Survey.