ISIS - a thing of the past

callorhinus said:
Oh. I mean our zoo to become a member of ISIS.

Edit: Finally I have found member list but not info about fee.
Click to expand...

@callorhinus, there is a minimum fee and up from there it is something like 5% of annual turn-over or something.

QUOTE: "Membership is available in three different forms, assocaition, educational license and biological institution, costs for membership are based on your budget or attendance figures, our membership staff are happy to work with you to define these costs.
Contact ISIS Membership Services


What is my ZIMS fee? Do I have to pay it each year?
To support the ZIMS project, ISIS has relied on loans and contributions from almost 150 zoological institutions.
However, this was not enough funding to complete this project so the ISIS Board of Trustees approved a one-time ZIMS fee for those members who did not contribute to the ZIMS capital campaign. Revenue from this fee is essential for ISIS to pay back our ZIMS construction loans, maintain our momentum in getting new institutions ready to use ZIMS and to invest in continued development of the software.

The ZIMS fee is required from all members, even if you do not plan on utilizing the ZIMS program at this point. The structure of the fees were designed assuming all members would pay, so any member that doesn’t pay, regardless of whether or not they will use the software initially, puts more pressure on the remaining members.
New members now pay an initiation fee, which is equal to the ZIMS fee previously assessed on our members." UNQOUTE

Link to website: FAQ

Just click on the link for Contact Membership Services they will be able to tell you what the fee for your institution will be.
 
callorhinus said:
ISIS website has not complicated design but I cannot find some information like annual fee or list of members. Can anyone help me please?
Click to expand...

Its because annual fees are proportional to each institution's budget/attendance, etc.
 
Previously one could check on the website where the membership of ISIS / ZIMS is based. This is now behind the Membership Community Portal.

For a time they maintained a list of those - some 800 - institutions that are on-line on ZIMS/ISIS. Not so any longer … alas.
 
Drew said:
They have had many complaints (mostly from zoochatters I'm sure) about not being able to access this previously accessible information. In the meantime they asked that people e-mail their inquiries
to news@isis.org.
Click to expand...

The shame of it is you can't just browse the site at leisure any more, looking up species as they may occurr to you. Its okay if you can ask them about a specific species(up to five I believe) but its not the same as the information all being there at the click of a button.
 
MRJ said:
In replying to Kifaru Bwana I thought I would include a little history and background, as there seems to be some confusion as to what ISIS is and what it does. Sorry if I am covering ground Zoochatters are already familiar with.

ISIS is a member based organisation, and has been around for about 40 years. Its members are mostly zoos, but it is open to any organisation keeping wild animals. "ISIS" stands for International Species Inventory System, and it provides record keeping and population management software for its members. A basic principle of ISIS is that members share data.

Probably the best known software program is the record keeping program ARKS. This is a DOS based program, so dates back to the early days of desktop computers. To give you an idea about how it works, you move a cursor over menu options then click to select. All data is retained in the institutions computer. To meet the data sharing requirements data backups are meant to be sent back to ISIS on a regular basis. Before email became widespread, this involved posting backup discs to ISIS head office in Minnesota.

There was an attempt to produce a Windows version about a decade ago, but I understand it never got beyond Beta testing. Effectively ISIS jumped right over Windows and went to a web based program with ZIMS.

With ZIMS the program and all data is held in the cloud. Obviously this makes it much easier to search and access data across all collections, as it is all held in one common data base. Each individual animal will now have it's own discreet record. When an animal is moved from one zoo to another, the record keeper now just clicks on the animal's record and transfers the right to amend it to the receiving zoo. Thus ISIS records will instantly be updated for each zoos holdings.

With ARKS the sending zoo would print off their ARKS records for the animal and post it off to the receiving zoo. The record officer of the receiving zoo would then enter the data into their ARKS program. Obviously ISIS records would not be updated until the records officer had entered the data, and done a backup to ISIS. The delays in this occurring would be one reason for inaccurate ISIS data that many have noted from time to time. Another problem was incomplete or inaccurate transcription of data. For instance, animals that had moved between several zoos could end up with several different birth dates. ZIMS removes that problem.

One reason it has taken so long to move from ARKS to ZIMS is that the process requires that these errors are corrected as far as possible.

Hope that helps, and happy to answer any other questions.
Click to expand...

Hi, actually ARKS4, the last incarnation of ARKS, was a windows based database. It was a module of CMS, the Collection Management System, which also included the Species Holdings. CMS was released in 1999.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top