Paleonet: [Paleodb] please express your support

[Cuny, Gilles]

Friends of the Paleobiology Database:

Please give this letter the widest distribution possible.

As you know, the Database is rapidly expanding and improving. We have a
large and growing set of contributors from around the globe, and just
added three more today. With 150,000 taxonomic opinions and 68,000
collections, our coverage extends almost everywhere and is excellent in
many places. We have high hit and visit rates, excellent web crawler
indexing, strong ties to other informatics organizations, a long list of
official publications and Online Systematics Archives, and a steady
procession of new features. The last year's emphasis on taxonomy and
ease of use have now made the Database a platform for entering, viewing,
analyzing, and downloading almost any kind of paleontological data. Our
organizational model of open membership, community governance, and
distributed, web-based computing combined with our results-oriented
approach is the reason for our success.

Nonetheless, NSF's Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology program has just
declined our latest request for funding. We are currently exploring
other options for obtaining support. However, in the short term we do
not have enough funds to continue our operations until another grant can
be decided upon by any program within NSF.

The Database per se is not in immediate danger because of our
distributed model and advanced state of development. Our servers will
continue to work, and I will continue to perform routine database
management, software maintenance, account management, and other tasks.
Our data are thoroughly backed up, and our entire site could be
reconstituted on any server within a few hours. Thus, there is no risk
whatsoever in putting your data into the system.

However, the expiration of our current grant will have serious
consequences.

* We will have to let go Peter Schroeter, our database manager and
software developer. Peter has greatly improved our systems, and knows
our entire 41,000 code base inside and out. Recruiting and training a
replacement would take many months, and I think it is extremely unlikely
that we could find someone as competent, talented, and productive as
him.

* We will have to cancel the summer course indefinitely.

* We will be unable to hold annual meetings of the Advisory Board.

* We will be unable to replace our servers when the time comes.

Considering the fact that we are now the primary web-based source of
data on the fossil record and serve the entire discipline, our budget is
quite modest. We have a two person staff. Many larger informatics
operations with long-term funding at much higher levels have had
considerably less success.

Although we cannot ask SGP to provide long term support at this
juncture, we can reasonably request short-term bridge funding to keep
the Database running until other funds can be obtained. We are only
hoping for a supplement to our existing grant that would equal about 2%
of their normal annual budget. Such a decision would have to be made
very quickly.

I would therefore like to ask you and your colleagues to please write to
Paul Filmer (pfilmer at nsf.gov), the program officer at SGP who has
handled our grant proposals. Consider telling him politely but directly
just how important the Paleobiology Database is to you.  
Please also CC your letter to Rich Lane (hlane at nsf.gov), SGP's other
program officer, who may wish to hear your comments given his interest
in paleontology.

Thanks in advance for your support at this crucial time.

Cheers,

John Alroy
The Paleobiology Database
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
735 State Street, Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101-3351
phone: (805) 892-2519
FAX: (805) 892-2510
e-mail: alroy at nceas.ucsb.edu

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