“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, mcli@loc.gov)