Many of us in the government documents world woke up to 2012 with the following message posted on the Web site of the [[National_Biological_Information_Infrastructure|National Biological Information Infrastructure]] (NBII) and distributed around to various library listservs:
In the 2012 President’s Budget Request, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is terminated. As a result, all resources, databases, tools, and applications within this web site will be removed on January 15, 2012.
NBII has been a critical program since 1994 (See Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 12906 which created the “National Spatial Data Infrastructure” (“NSDI”)). NBII was set up to coordinate a broad array of information at the federal level about biodiversity and ecosystems.
Todd Carpenter, director of National Information Standards Organization NISO, put it nicely and succinctly when he tweeted:
What is particularly sad about NBII shutting down is it’s precisely the thing we need MORE of not less=>trusted data repositories #opendata
Well have no fear, the Library of Congress, Internet Archive and Stanford Libraries have all harvested (separately) the NBII Website — Stanford harvested twice between January 5 and January 13, 2012for its Fugitive US Agencies collection.
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