Financial Contributions

Arctos has a modest annual operating cost that is shared by members of the Arctos consortium. This covers the following expenses:

  • Support for the Arctos Programmer (100% time). The Arctos Database Administrator (25% time) is supported through an agreement between the Berkeley Natural History Museums and Berkeley IT, University of California Berkeley.
  • Support for the Data Migration Coordinator
  • Arctos hosting at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), including all hardware, backup, and security needs.
  • Miscellaneous expenses, including Arctos-related travel as needed, hardware or software upgrades, and domain name and web hosting fees.
  • A base share of the Arctos TACC Project Allocation for digital media storage  (currently set at 1 TB and subject to change dependent on the percentage of total storage currently in use).  For more information please see the Arctos TACC Project Allocation Digital Media Policy.

The annual financial contribution for Arctos partners includes a subscription fee of $100, a per record fee that is tiered by the number of object records, and an administration fee. Fees are paid to the Arctos fiscal sponsor Community Initiatives.

The per record fee is applied to collections with more than 10,000 records as follows:

# Records – From # Records – To Per Record Fee
10,001 100,000 $0.03
100,001 500,000 $0.025
500,001 1,000,000 $0.020
1,000,001 1,500,000 $0.015
1,500,001   $0.010

This online Excel Calculator will estimate the potential annual financial contribution for a collection.

The fee schedule is subject to change as approved by the Arctos Advisory Committee

Contributing to New Arctos Developments

Arctos is a dynamic and comprehensive informatics tool that is continually adding new features for querying, managing, and integrating diverse kinds of collections-related data, ranging from more traditional kinds of museum records to genomic and isotopic data generated from biological records. Requests for major new developments in Arctos (major enhancements to existing features, completely innovative features) require external funding. Such developments are typically driven by grant proposals submitted by individual or multiple participating institutions that have consulted with the Arctos Working Group officers. To ensure appropriate development, institutions that submit proposals with funding for new Arctos developments must contact the Chair of the Arctos Advisory Board and the Arctos Director. The Director will be able to sign letters of support for NSF grants.