The Illinois Natural History Survey signed a cooperative agreement with the National Biological Service for Federal Fiscal Year 1995. The purpose of this agreement was to exchange information on biological resources developed at local, state, and federal levels. One of the goals of this agreement was to make the Illinois Natural History Survey's vast biological specimen collection data available to a larger scientific community. The Survey holds approximately seven million specimens. With the use of ORACLE as a data server and ArcInfo as a mapping tool, the Illinois Natural History Survey is designing an information server to distribute these collection data. This information server is accessible via the World Wide Web. Using the National Biological Service grant as a seed, the Illinois Natural History Survey is continuing to develop and organize its collection databases. A number of steps were taken in the organization of the data. These collection data were in several different file formats and on several different (unnetworked) machines. These data were organized into one file format on several networked machines. ORACLE is used as the data search-engine to drive Web queries, while collections managers are still able to access and edit the data with their own data editing software. These data were also modified to mesh with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources' Geographic Information System. Each collection has a location from where it was collected. These collection points are mapped (digitized) using a graphical user interface created by an AML specially written for this project. Each collection has a number of spatial location fields within its associated data table. Depending on the completeness of data, collection maps can be produced at several different spatial scales: at the country, state, county, township, section, or exact point location level. Sensitive collections, such as threatened and endangered species, are flagged in order to track access to these data. Persons accessing the Illinois Natural History Survey's World Wide Web site will be able to access our collections data and receive a map of their data query "on the fly." The level of spatial resolution is determined by the completeness of data, spatial distribution of the data query, and special tracking controls on data distribution.
The rapid growth of GIS technology stems from the trend of this age: access to information is critical to plan and manage the complex needs and requirements of our society. Personal privacy, although long considered to be a fundamental American constitutional right, has never been explicitly protected in either the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or any federal legislation. The legislative trend has been to increase the access to government-held data through the enactments of the Freedom of Information Act and its state progeny legislation. The access of information currently afforded to anyone is phenomenal. Our government has never intended to be the watchdog to protect the individual's right of privacy. On the contrary, under the Freedom of Information Act, the government is the custodian subject to pressures and possible lawsuits between the individual demanding the right to information and the individual requiring the government to deny the individual access to his personal private information. The intricacies of this conflict will be discussed from a constitutional, political and societal perspective.