Helpful Introduction

Introduction to Arctos

About Arctos
Arctos is a multidisciplinary museum based management information system for natural history collections. It combines collection management with public web presence in order to explicitly demonstrate collection usage and integrate with other web services. Arctos is intended to be used by collection managers, curators, collection users, scientists, and anyone interested in collection records.

Key features include applications for collection management and object tracking, tools and services for data visualization and mapping (e.g., using BerkeleyMapper, BioGeomancer), and partnerships with external web resources (e.g., GenBank, Texas Advanced Computing Center) to link records with associated data and media.

Arctos code is open source, and users form a strong community that contribute to data standards, application enhancements, and improved data quality through sharing of authorities for taxonomy, geography, people names, part types, and other data.

Arctos can be accessed at: arctos.database.museum

From this site you can search for museum specimens by species, locality, date, collector, and other search criteria. Many of the records have additional information associated with them, such as parasites collected from the specimen, measurements of the specimen, geographic latitude and longitude and specimen images. Below is a screen capture of the search page of Arctos.

After you familiarize yourself with Arctos, you can change and refine your search by clicking the “Show More Options” in the top right corner of each webpage. For example, you can search only one of the collections for specimens of one species, collected by a certain person in a certain time frame, from a particular state. For now, follow the steps below just to see how Arctos works.

1. Go to the Arctos website, http://arctos.database.museum/
2. Leave all the fields at their default, except in the second section down, Identification and Taxonomy, type house mouse in the field for Any Taxonomic Element. Hit the Search button in the bottom left corner.
3. You should retrieve 4700 records, in a table that looks like this:

As you can see, the default information displayed is the catalog number, species, locality, date, and decimal degrees (latitude and longitude).

4. To narrow our search go back to the search page by clicking the “Search” in the top left of the screen, just under the bear.
5. This time, do a search with the following criteria: a. Change the collection to DMNS Mammals from the drop box under the Identifiers section b. In the Identification and Taxonomy section, enter chipmunk in the Any Taxonomic Element field c. In the Locality section, enter New Mexico in the Any Geographic Element Field d. In the Date/Collector section, change the dropdown menu to Preparator and in the field type in Bell

Your fields should look like this:

6. Click the search button again.
7. This time you should retrieve a much smaller number of records. There are 29 chipmunks collected in New Mexico prepared by someone with the last name Bell.
8. In the top left hand corner of the screen, under Records . . . change the drop down so that records 1-29 are displayed.
9. Now click on the blue “Customize Form” button in the middle on the top of the table. A window will pop up.
10. Under “Locality”, click the box for county and scroll down that window and click the box for state_prov. Under “Random” click the box for collectors and parts.

11. Click “Close and Refresh” in the top right corner of the window.
12. You now have a lot more information about each specimen. This is just an example of what you can find in Arctos, there is much more information you can access. Do some searches using the different search criteria and changing the fields around.