9408389 Humphries The MUSE Project is a long term effort to support the computerization and management of natural history museum collection resources. For the past six years the MUSE Project has designed, coded, and distributed software for the management of biological collection materials to over 70 individual collections around the world (Table 1). The range of services provided includes user training, workshops on museum computerization, network resources, and data models and data standards, participation in international efforts to facilitate the exchange of biological collection information, newsletter production, and maintenance of network resources (e.g., Gopher, World-Wide-Web and FTP servers and a MUSE list serve). The goals of the next phase of the MUSE Project include five primary objectives: (1) Continuation of support for existing MUSE users as well as assisting new sites with the adoption of MUSE. The largest single activity of the MUSE Project is support for existing sites. (2) Improvements to the MUSE suite of software including improved support for features of the Association of Systematics Collections data model, addition of geographic authority file verification, new forms of user security, new data logging features (allowing the permanent tracking of all data changes), improving the ease with which users can themselves make changes in MUSE data dictionaries, means for associating research data with specimen records, and improved support for international users. (3) Development of MUSE for new taxonomic disciplines and improving features of MUSE for currently supported disciplines. MUSE has been modified to deal with all vertebrate groups and is currently being modified for herbaria. We would like to continue adding support for invertebrate collections as well as more diverse types of herbaria. (4) Development of direct network access methods for MUSE databases. Data are currently exported from MUSE databases to provide Internet access. We will develop tools for direct access to PC servers located on the net. (5) Continued porting of the MUSE environment to Windows. The Windows version of the MUSE program itself is nearing completion, but all of the additional software and access tolls need to be ported to Windows.
