National Biological Information Infrastructure

» see nbii.gov as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The National Biological Information Infrastructure was the United States trying to build one front door for everything the country knew about its own living things. Fish counts and invasive species records, sitting in a dozen agencies in incompatible formats, mostly unusable by anyone outside the office that had produced them. NBII's job was to put a standards layer underneath all of that and a public web portal on top of it.

The mandate came out of a 1993 National Research Council report titled "A Biological Survey for the Nation", which asked the Department of the Interior to oversee a National Biotic Resource Information System. In April 1994 President Clinton signed Executive Order 12906 to create the National Spatial Data Infrastructure for geographic data. Alongside it, with no executive order of his own, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt renamed the biological system the National Biological Information Infrastructure. In 1996 the Office of Management and Budget amended Circular A-130, the document that governs how federal information is managed, to include it.

So the thing existed on paper from the mid-nineties. The money did not arrive until 2001, and when it did it was far below what the 1993 report had asked for. NBII spent its whole life as a well-specified system with a thin budget, which is a specific kind of government death sentence: you are real enough to appear in the next budget as a line item, and never real enough to be defended as essential.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the paper trail ~

In 1998 the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology published "Teaming With Life: Investing in Science to Understand and Use America's Living Capital", which repeated the 1993 findings and urged that current information technology actually be applied to science data. That report is the reason the nodes got appropriated three years later. In 2002 the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils gave NBII an award for Outstanding Intergovernmental Technology Solutions.

The reviews from people who used it were less generous. A 2007 piece in College and Research Libraries News found valuable databases buried four or five layers into the site hierarchy and concluded that "a great deal of persistence may be required to find a particular database." Earlier reviewers described bouncing between the portal and the underlying databases as "a tedious exercise indeed." The structure was supposed to be invisible to the end user. It was not.

~ the nodes ~

The architecture was deliberately narrow per piece. Each node took one geography or one subject and went deep: the Southwest Information Node on desert ecosystems, a Fisheries and Aquatic Resources node, a Bird node, a Mid Atlantic node. Internationally NBII sat inside the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network. Through those it ran the invasive species information network for the Americas and partnered on FishBase for the Americas. For a program nobody outside the field could name, it was wired into a lot of other countries' biodiversity plumbing.

~ the day the domain went off ~

The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2012 named NBII as one of more than two hundred programs slated for termination or reduction. The FY2011 continuing resolution for USGS, finalized in May 2011, pulled the start of the shutdown forward a year, so the dismantling began before the formal termination year even started. On 3 October 2011 USGS posted a notice on every NBII website and application: on 15 January 2012 the nbii.gov domain and everything living on it would be turned off.

It was. There was no migration and no successor portal to redirect anybody to. The notice was the whole process.

~ what librarians kept ~

The part worth remembering is what happened in the fifteen weeks between the notice and the switch. Government documents librarians read the termination page, understood that a .gov domain going dark means the files go with it, and started crawling. The Library of Congress took it into its web archive. The Free Government Information people wrote it up with the flat title "NBII goes dark. Libraries do what they do: harvest and preserve it for future access."

That is the inheritance. A national data infrastructure that took eighteen years to build and three months to erase survives because a handful of librarians treated a federal shutdown notice as a deadline. Nothing in the termination plan asked them to.

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