2026 Digital Data: Building Shared Biodiversity Infrastructure - Day 3, Standardizing Data In Arctos

Building a collaborative working group to standardize paleontology data infrastructure in the Arctos collections management system Arctos serves 26 paleontological collections that comprise nearly 500,000 specimen records. Although originally designed for biological collections data, Arctos has become a dynamic and actively growing collections management solution for paleontology. Its community-driven approach empowers collections managers and curators from multiple institutions to collaborate to improve data structure, functionality, and overall user experience. Arctos is now actively responding to the unique needs of managing paleontological collections data. To this end, we formed the multi-institution Arctos paleontology committee to address issues such as building shared controlled vocabularies, determining data standards, and establishing best practices that maximize efficiency while maintaining data integrity. Ongoing work includes developing a shared controlled vocabulary for lithostratigraphic units, determining source authorities such as national databases and peer reviewed literature, reconciling legacy data to meet new standards, and developing documentation to improve the process of importing data for both existing and new collections. In the future, we aspire to address similar concerns with chronostratigraphy, taxonomy, integration of standardized fossil morphotypes into identifications, and other challenges particular to managing paleontological data. We look forward to responding as a community to new opportunities and challenges in managing the living data as Arctos continues to grow. Speaker: Katherine L. Anderson, Vertebrate Paleontology Collections Manager (Burke Museum, University of Washington Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture) Co-authors: Paige Wilson Deibel (University of Washington Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture) Ronald C. Eng (University of Washington Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture) Talia Karim (University of Colorado Museum of Natural History) Teresa J. Mayfield-Meyer (Arctos) Dawn Roberts (Chicago Academy of Sciences) Nicole Volden (New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science)