[Nhcoll-l] no data specimens

[Editor FourCats Press]

For perhaps a different perspective: As someone who is at the stage of life
of having to think about how to pass on an invertebrate paleontology
collection I’ve carefully curated for 47 years, the idea that my specimens
might end up in a bucket for kids to scoop through is enough to make me
want to cart the whole thing to the landfill. An added irony is knowing how
hard museums, institutions, and professional associations have argued over
the years for limiting/prohibiting access to fossil resources by “amateurs”
and how many museums and universities have thousands of square feet of
specimens they've “protected” but that no one has ever looked at. Craig
Childs’ _Finders Keepers_ took a crack at this problem in the context of
archaeology/anthropology, but I’ve yet to see the issue taken seriously (in
print) by museum professionals.

Wendell Ricketts
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20211014/8a7261e7/attachment.html>