Modern research and conservation efforts require high quality, verifiable data, to deduce a baseline historic community at various spatial scales and ideally lots of it, so that models and complex analyses can be madefor trend detection, modeling and other sorts of complex analyses. There is thus a critical need to bring historic occurrence data together, normalize them, georeference them (so they can be mapped), detect/correct errors, and provide them to the world. Before this project (<2006), museum data for Texas' fish were only available from many disparate and often hard to find sources, located in several countries and managed in various incompatible databases. Some of these museums lacked a digital record of their collections, having paper ledgers only. Many are small museums that did not offer their data online (although this is now changing quickly). Some had no catalog at all, except what is recorded on jar labels with great variability in how the managed data. Many rarely updated their databases as taxonomy changed or examined specimens as new information was learned. Spelling mistakes and other typographical errors were common among all data fields in most museums. These problems make useful made queries difficult to impossible.
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