“In recent years, how­ever, the NBII–like so many other impor­tant fed­eral programs–was plagued with bud­get cuts. The FY 2012 bud­get man­dated its ter­mi­na­tion. The main Web site, www.nbii.gov, will be taken offline on Jan­u­ary 15, 2012, along with all of its asso­ci­ated node sites.

The NBII pro­vided three main ben­e­fits to the bio­log­i­cal resource com­mu­nity. First, its design as a fed­er­a­tion of part­ners allowed it to assist data own­ers in main­tain­ing crit­i­cal assets that might not oth­er­wise be made broadly avail­able; sec­ond, sci­en­tists, man­agers, and oth­ers search­ing for data on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject could do so from a sin­gle, Web-based source rather than hav­ing to go to the sites of numer­ous orga­ni­za­tions to com­pile the results they sought; and third, the NBII pro­vided users with direct access to many data resources that are deeply embed­ded in struc­tured data­bases on the Web and that are rel­e­vant to biology–resources that would not be revealed to them using a stan­dard search engine such as Google.

USGS staff now are work­ing with part­ners to iden­tify ways that–to the extent possible–will help to fill the gap in data access that will be cre­ated when the NBII goes offline.”

To read more about the National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­ture, here’s a link from which the above quote was taken:

http://www.usgs.gov/core_science_systems/Access/p1111-1.html

A Post­script:

“The Library of Con­gress is a part of a col­lab­o­ra­tive web archive project to archive U.S. Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Web­sites, and this site has been crawled by the Inter­net Archive as a part of that project. It is not pub­licly acces­si­ble yet but it has been preserved.

Since we’re a part of the col­lab­o­ra­tive project, we’ll even­tu­ally get a copy of that cap­ture for the Library of Con­gress archives.”

/mrc (Mar­garet Clifton, )