[Nhcoll-l] Strategic plan/vision for the collection community

Fri Jan 23 09:51:33 EST 2015

A few years ago the Smithsonian hosted a conference called “21st Century
Learning in Natural History Settings.”  It included institutions from across
the spectrum of sizes and disciplines in natural history and promoted a lot
of productive discussion.  Unfortunately, they stopped short of finalizing a
definitive document that stated common values, goals, and standards.
However, many of these things can be found in the discussion summaries and
there are some nice drafts that may inform your own development.  The
homepage is here https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__21centurylearningnmnh.wikispaces.com_&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=2YvGtgYNe5YcOGgx1cAh95RjtIvaWNj_rTum9RQKthU&s=xvweIh9892Q1OkBWig2Pwe8QY_XP5aa3Sv82IOfwihI&e=    Of
particular interest may be the long term vision and value draft
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__21centurylearningnmnh.wikispaces.com_Long-2Bterm-2BVision-2Band-2BValue&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=2YvGtgYNe5YcOGgx1cAh95RjtIvaWNj_rTum9RQKthU&s=2VK_QfQikN6kYWrOMSpwRodThTtK9YqNyvSDsQrt_cs&e=  .

---Steve

Steven M. Sullivan  |  Senior Curator of Urban Ecology

The Chicago Academy of Sciences and its Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

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The Urban Gateway to Nature and Science

From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu
[mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Dirk Neumann
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 1:53 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Strategic plan/vision for the collection community

Hi all,

the European Consortium of nat. his. Collections is currently developing
such strategic goals, but they have early draft status at the moment.
Earlier Position papers are available here:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cetaf.org_taxonomy_publications&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=2YvGtgYNe5YcOGgx1cAh95RjtIvaWNj_rTum9RQKthU&s=gin2j25oaTCS6sOGZIz5RXE-SYiaTDuzYxDODy41uvs&e= 
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cetaf.org_taxonomy_
publications&d=AwMD-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_
h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=Btwigzn4Ka_ZAZ6_1Uyrwr3f8nanfFzFXqc00-4H37g&s=iwfEUqhMdPm
Cqf-ccXp5RngTSY0lRrmCi6Sa5UcC2F0&e=> 

However, as others already mentioned, at the moment there is a strong focus
on all those fancy advances (Digitisation, barcoding, etc.), but we should
not forget about the boring stuff: collections. 

Collections are the foundation of all those nice outreaching initiatives.
And instead of creating soft language on "integration of collections" which
actually means shutting down and closing of collections, loss of taxonomic
expertise and conservation knowledge, we should be careful not to risk and
loose our expertise. Instead, we have to develop further, as especially DNA
& tissue collections do not only need a lot of know-how in a changing legal
environment, but also towards collection care: for long term storage, we are
still in trial mode, there are no standards and no best practice.

At the same time, we and our ollections are confronted with a massive loss
in knowledge (retirement, staff cutting, discontinued preparation skills,
...) and problems arising from usage of new techniques (just want to mention
climate control & air pollutants). So preventive conservation should receive
not only sufficient recognition in strategic plans, but play a vital role.

As siad before: our key business is collections. Without collections, we are
nothing.

All the best
Dirk

Am 23.01.2015 um 00:38 schrieb Doug Yanega:

On 1/22/15 7:39 AM, Sublett, Clayton wrote:

Hi all,

Our collection is working on a strategic plan, and, as much as possible, I
would like to work in goals of the natural history collections community.
Does anyone know if there is a strategic vision for natural history
collections/museums?  The Organization for Biological Field Stations handed
out a strategic vision at their 2013 meeting, and I was hoping something
like this existed for collections.  Beyond the push to database, digitize,
and make collection data available online, I'm not sure about the goals of
the community.  Any advice or input would be greatly appreciated.

As others have already commented, though without much elaboration, it
strikes me that as a community most of our "strategy" boils down to little
more than damage control. Someone publishes a paper in Science accusing
collections-based scientists of driving species to extinction, and we
scramble to mobilize a rebuttal; some adminstrators somewhere decide to shut
down a major collection, and we scramble to flood them with letters of
support for the threatened collection. Rinse and repeat. On the whole, we
are generally on the defensive, and we either hold our ground, or lose it -
we never seem to advance - and that is about all the exposure we can expect
to get. The average person is more interested in reading their horoscope
than in reading anyone's mission statement, so unless we are acting in the
role of protesting something, and gaining visibility thereby, no one is
likely to pay any attention to us ("Don't it always seem to go that you
don't know what you've got til it's gone"). Even within our own
institutions, the higher administrative levels tend to treat everything like
a business, and very few collections - especially if they have few or no
public displays - actually generate profit, and collections (like libraries)
are therefore more likely to be viewed as a form of charitable public
service, to be supported only so long as we don't cost TOO much to maintain,
relative to our PR value. It isn't clear to me, then, how any amount of
advocacy can really counteract such a fundamental and unavoidable fact; most
collections do not generate more revenue than they consume, and never will.
>From an administrator's point of view, a collection is a hole into which
money pours but never comes back out. How can we make real advances and
promote our interests when we owe our existence to what amounts to
charitable forbearance?

More worrisome still, I will note that even within the community that we
serve, the role of traditional collections-based science is being
increasingly downplayed; the document Ellen Paul linked earlier, for
example, makes no explicit reference to legacy material or vouchered
specimens. There are many references to "knowledge" and "information" and
"data" (as well as three uses of the term "molecular"), but nothing at all
about museums or specimens. One can only presume that this reflects an
increasing number of systematists who do not feel that their work requires
any such infrastructure. In essence, every single point in the stated agenda
can be accomplished without requiring the actual physical archival of (or
reference to) whole organismal specimens, maintained in public depositories.
If the explicit vision for the future of systematics as a discipline extols
the virtues of molecular data but does not mention museums, then we are
facing a much deeper problem than being misunderstood by our administrators;
we are possibly looking at a future where the taxonomic community that we
have served for centuries considers us irrelevant and archaic. Of the many
taxonomists that have visited our collection in the last several years, a
fair number had little or no interest in seeing or borrowing specimens that
are more than 10 years old, because they only wanted material from which
they could potentially extract DNA - and I imagine that trend will continue.
How long can we argue to maintain legacy material if we can't even point to
taxonomists that rely upon it?

Sincerely,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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