HISPID, the Herbarium Information Standards and Protocols for Interchange of Data, has been the standard used in Australian herbaria (at least) since the first version was published in 1989. The last major update of HISPID took place in 2007, when the transfer format was changed from one based on ASN.1 to one based on XML using ABCD’s extension schema capability.
In the last decade the use of herbarium data – also outside the herbarium community – has increased significantly and the requirements on our data have changed. Partly because of our focus on Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH), we haven’t kept HISPID up-to-date with these changes and the data we provide through AVH is ahead of our standard.
There are now two other standards, both of which are partly based on HISPID, that have found wider adoption internationally, Darwin Core and ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data). The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) uses Darwin Core for all its occurrence data, so AVH data has to be in that format as well. However, the definitions in both ABCD and Darwin Core tend to be rather general and we still need HISPID to provide definitions and vocabularies that are more specialised towards herbarium data (while still complying with the broader definitions in Darwin Core). Also, besides being an exchange standard, HISPID has over the years also served as a content standard for herbarium collections databases. At this time, when several university herbaria are looking into setting up collections databases and join AVH, it is especially for this reason that HISPID is still important. It is also mostly for this reason that it is important to get HISPID back up to date.
Therefore, the (Australian) Herbarium Information Systems Committee (HISCOM) has committed to undertake a review of HISPID in the 2014–15 financial year.