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Short abstract:

In 1974, a small group of Minneapolis-based individuals launched the International Species Information System (ISIS), a computerized database of exotic animals kept in zoos. This paper explores the context in which the system arose and how it shaped the (im)mobilities of zoo animals.

Long abstract:

With species increasingly threatened in their natural habitats, the last half century has seen a growing popularity of so-called ex situ conservation in zoos. This approach has required an overhaul of the traditional functioning of zoological gardens. Up to the 1970s, most zoos relied on a steady influx of wild-caught animals. Becoming conservation institutions, then, implied refocusing on the exchange of captive-bred animals in a (global) exchange circuit of zoos. It was with an eye on enabling such a circuit that, in 1974, the International Species Information System (ISIS) was launched.

Developed by a small group of Minneapolis-based individuals, the computerized database of zoo animals is used by over 1300 zoos across the world today. At first sight, ISIS looks like a neutral instrument of universal data collecting. Yet, as historians of information systems know, such a thing does not exist. Analyzing the early history of ISIS, my paper will explore the legal, socio-political and scientific contexts in which the system was developed, and highlight how locally rooted ambitions as well as global inequalities and competition shaped its design and operation. Despite its aura of globality, detachment, and neutrality, it becomes clear that ISIS could only function because of its situated, political, and embodied character. These aspects also explain why, up to today, zoo animals (and their genes) do not freely float across the earth in the ways as ISIS’s planners conceived it in the 1970s.