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

Fri Jan 23 14:44:26 EST 2015

It is exactly these questions and more that we as SPNHC hope to address with our joint NSF funded RCN NIBA proposal with NSCA and AIBS.  To learn more and get involved go to www.niballiance.org.

First thing we need to do is engage the wider community and solicit input from as many sources as possible to ensure that we have all information at our disposal.  Some of the links provided here will be great fodder for discussion at the upcoming proposed workshops.

Thanks

Andy

    A  :             A  :             A  :
 }<(((_°>.,.,.,.}<(((_°>.,.,.,.}<)))_°>
    V                V                V
Andy Bentley
Ichthyology Collection Manager
University of Kansas
Biodiversity Institute
Dyche Hall
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS, 66045-7561
USA

Tel: (785) 864-3863
Fax: (785) 864-5335 
Email: abentley at ku.edu  
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__ichthyology.biodiversity.ku.edu&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=SRjq0XJmC5Bfc7LUfarcwGZRCWqXzJatf3nB6LiRa4o&s=SwCJDXutZZBXJ30yDLBX42FCYmHtAYl44a1ZnGbNrZ4&e= 

SPNHC President
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.spnhc.org&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=SRjq0XJmC5Bfc7LUfarcwGZRCWqXzJatf3nB6LiRa4o&s=JR2pdfERd2EJGHpayP5GA9weMfFQeJcyV3TisQEa6Xg&e= 

                           :                 :    
    A  :             A  :             A  :
 }<(((_°>.,.,.,.}<(((_°>.,.,.,.}<)))_°>
    V                V                V

-----Original Message-----
From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Bryant, James
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 11:41 AM
To: ssullivan at naturemuseum.org; nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Strategic plan/vision for the collection community

Thank you for sharing this, Steven.

I find it remarkable that the Smithsonian's effort came to a halt after 2012, especially given the resources that they had to press on. However, it was valuable that NMNH  took into consideration so many of the outside influences (positive and negative) on natural history collections. If we don't give ample weight to these influences - especially the potential sources of support among the general public - we risk the loss of our programs.

James M. Bryant
Curator of Natural History
Museum Depart., City of Riverside
3580 Mission Inn Avenue
Riverside, CA 92501
TEL: 951-826-5273
FAX: 951-369-4970
jbryant at riversideca.gov  

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Sullivan
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 6:52 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Strategic plan/vision for the collection community

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=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=qeqcTQNtLWhnFUPIDc8Ge0K0gaf-M4LBbzmXO_z3ADI&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=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=8Odn_kQnJM1fIiI_eIXi1TR5RJRWAoehzHjrq_vxoJA&e=  .

---Steve

Steven M. Sullivan  |  Senior Curator of Urban Ecology The Chicago Academy of Sciences and its Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

Museum|2430 North Cannon Drive|Chicago Illinois 60614|naturemuseum.org
Collections|4001 North Ravenswood Ave.|Chicago Illinois 
Collections|60613|projectsquirrel.org
P 708-937-6253 | F 773-549-0344 | ssullivan at naturemuseum.org

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=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=gC7A2h_fYuBCaQi-8ALeBj9e96ak7JB-9k5OKi9rRe8&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)
             https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__cache.ucr.edu_-7Eheraty_yanega.html&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=ZRHWt1X_kGgR6kOMa5fpiIiPoUQutTnW4H-Zn2ZRar0&e=
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

_______________________________________________
Nhcoll-l mailing list
Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l

_______________________________________________
NHCOLL-L is brought to you by the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), an international society whose mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to society. See https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.spnhc.org&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=3hZYKOyXdFgD_jydJj161y7sgRZoO5eDJFmzCt4DQFQ&e=  for membership information.

-- 
Dirk Neumann

Tel: 089 / 8107-111
Fax: 089 / 8107-300
email: Dirk.Neumann(a)zsm.mwn.de

Postanschrift:

Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns
Zoologische Staatssammlung München
Dirk Neumann, Sektion Ichthyologie / DNA-Labor
Münchhausenstr. 21
81247 München

Besuchen Sie unsere Sammlung:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.zsm.mwn.de_ich_&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=GGAFAvvpumdqAQU5SmJaQLad7KoMpnI_6nusdJVPmRs&e= 

---------

Dirk Neumann

Tel: +49-89-8107-111
Fax: +49-89-8107-300
email: Dirk.Neumann(a)zsm.mwn.de

postal address:

Bavarian Natural History Collections
The Bavarian State Collection of Zoology
Dirk Neumann, Section Ichthyology / DNA-Lab
Muenchhausenstr. 21
81247 Munich (Germany)

Visit our section at:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.zsm.mwn.de_ich_&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=8sEPuksqsCwhcWCKKOl7cGqPgJVgRkWYjPLKF4IJR70&s=GGAFAvvpumdqAQU5SmJaQLad7KoMpnI_6nusdJVPmRs&e= 

_______________________________________________
Nhcoll-l mailing list
Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l

_______________________________________________ 
NHCOLL-L is brought to you by the Society for the Preservation of
Natural History Collections (SPNHC), an international society whose
mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of
natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to
society. See https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.spnhc.org&d=AwIFAw&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=SRjq0XJmC5Bfc7LUfarcwGZRCWqXzJatf3nB6LiRa4o&s=JR2pdfERd2EJGHpayP5GA9weMfFQeJcyV3TisQEa6Xg&e=  for membership information.