[Nhcoll-l] No-data specimens and the Graveyard Conundrum

[Callomon,Paul]

Several of the responses to this interesting thread point obliquely at the "graveyard conundrum". This is the famous proposal that if we continue to bury dead people in cemeteries we'll eventually run out of arable land and starve. Clearly that hasn't happened, so at some point someone must be making judgments as to what's worth keeping and what isn't.
In building a working and teachable philosophy of natural history museums we need not only to establish some general criteria for "scientific value" (both now and hypothetically) but also be clear about who gets to make those calls. Many research scientists insist that every last microscope slide or voucher specimen from their entire careers be cataloged and that that be prioritized over acquiring and sorting the collections of "amateurs", a term at which many still sneer. Museum management, on the other hand, can be blithely ignorant of any scheme of priorities other than things they immediately understand - famous names and "rarities".
When we think about the professionalization of collections management, therefore, a point we'd do well to promote is the collections manager as arbiter of value. (That's assuming that we don't hire people as CMs who are qualified and temperamentally inclined to be career researchers but who can't find a position at present so opt to "slum it" until something comes along).
The ability to size up a body of material and see how it might fit into the grand narrative of the museum's collections is something long-term CMs can develop best, given their extensive institutional knowledge, generally collegial nature and tendency to be objective about a specimen's "story".
A last point: techniques will certainly be developed in the future that will let us do things with specimens that we can't do now. However, the questions we are asking - what is the true nature of Nature and how do we maintain a healthy relationship with it - date back to the Greeks. A beautiful specimen with no data is unlikely ever to be of more use in answering them than a vouchered and accurately recorded collecting event.

Paul Callomon
Collection Manager, Malacology and General Invertebrates
________________________________
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia PA 19103-1195, USA
prc44 at drexel.edu<mailto:prc44 at drexel.edu> Tel 215-405-5096 - Fax 215-299-1170


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