Terms of use

The records

The specimen records on this site are the ones the Museum publishes to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and iDigBio, and records held by partner portals, each under the licence its publisher chose — for the Museum’s own records, Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 unless a record says otherwise. You may use, share and build on them with attribution. The citation line on each specimen page is the form we ask for; for a set of records, cite the Museum, the dataset and the date you took them, and GBIF where you used its copy.

Records are what the labels say, read by machines. They carry the collector’s spellings, the identifications of their time and the errors of transcription. The site marks what it has inferred — a coordinate placed by staff from the locality text, a collector matched to a biography, a journey reconstructed from dates — and these inferences are offered as such, not as facts of the record. The curators work through what looks wrong; the collection databases of the departments, not this site, are the records of authority.

Images

Photographs of specimens come either with the published record (under that record’s licence) or from the Museum’s own digital archive; each image names its source and licence where one is given. Photographs of living species and sightings are from iNaturalist and its contributors under the licences they chose; the credit beside each one is part of that licence. Collector portraits are from Wikimedia Commons under their stated licences. Department pages, featured objects and their stories are © Bishop Museum; ask before reusing them.

Answers written by models

The short summaries under Ask the collection answers and the Library assistant’s replies are written by a language model from figures or passages we give it. They can misread a question or a passage. The figures themselves are counted from the records and link to them; check there. The library assistant cites the publication and page it answers from; the publication, not the assistant, is the source to quote. Do not rely on either for a decision that matters without checking the records or the paper.

Sensitive localities

Exact localities of threatened species are withheld and their coordinates generalised. Please do not attempt to recover them from other sources using this site, and do not use the site to locate living populations of protected species.

Using the site

Reasonable automated use — a script that reads a few hundred pages, a download of a search — is welcome; for bulk data, use GBIF’s downloads, which carry the proper citation and are built for it. Do not run requests at a rate that degrades the site for others, probe the staff areas, or try to defeat the generalisation of sensitive localities. The question features are rate-limited and may be paused.

The site is provided as it is, without warranty. Content changes as the collections are catalogued and corrected; links to a specimen, taxon, collector, journey or place are meant to be permanent, and a record that is withdrawn says so at its address. We may change these terms; the date above is the date of the last change.

Questions about reuse, licensing or a correction: nicholasg@bishopmuseum.org, or the department named on the page.