All Catfish Species Inventory Image Base

Images of catfish submitted by ACSI Participants:

PDF documents related to catfish submitted by ACSI Participants:

All images in the ACSImagebase are protected by copyright. Each image is marked by the copyright statement of its creator. In general, images on this site have all rights reserved, may only be viewed on this site, and may not be downloaded. If you wish to use an image from this site for any other purpose, please contact the copyright holder of that image for permission.

If you would like to cite the ACSI Imagebase in a publication please use the citation: Morris, P.J., H.M. Yager, [programmers] and M.H. Sabaj Pérez [editor], 2006. ACSImagebase: A digital archive of catfish images compiled by participants in the All Catfish Species Inventory. [WWW image Database] URL http://acsi.acnatsci.org/base . If you cite individual images in the image base, please credit the people and institutions who provided the images.

The ACSI (All Catfish Species Inventory) project support website is built entirely with open source software, from the server housing the site to the image management software. From the beginning, open source software has been a critical part of site development for the project, and its website is committed to using only freely-available software.

The Apache HTTP server software is used to make images, data, and text available to the Internet, and all portions of the site and image collection are stored on a computer running the Linux operating system. Taxonomic and image data are managed using the PostgreSQL relational database management system, and site code is written in PHP scripting language.

In addition to the basic Apache/PostgreSQL/PHP combination for site management, the ACSI website uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to manage the secure login portion of the site, where participants can upload/view/download catfish images and PDF files of pertinent literature. And, the ImageMagick software suite is used for on-demand image creation and image manipulation. This allows us to store the images outside of the publicly-available web root. When a user requests an image on the AllCatfish website, a copy of the original image is made, reformatted for web display, and temporarily placed in a web-available folder for viewing. After the user has viewed the image, the copy is destroyed, conserving server space.

As of May 2008, The AllCatfish website makes 8,721 images available, using approximately 81GB of server space (34% of the available 260GB of dedicated server space). Regular backups are made of the image archive and site data, stored both on a backup server and on magnetic tape. The website was initially developed by Paul Morris (programmer) and Mark Sabaj Pérez (layout and editor) and is currently maintained and updated by Heather Yager, ANSP Biodiversity Database Programmer.