<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/22/15 7:39 AM, Sublett, Clayton
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:ED9AF458B8EB274FA35FB5B9DE664A780A8CE5@winex14mbx02.shsu.edu"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">
<style id="owaParaStyle">P {
MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN-TOP: 0px
}
</style>
<div style="direction: ltr;font-family: Times New Roman;color:
#000000;font-size: 12pt;">
<div>
<p>Hi all,</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
Sincerely,<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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)
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__cache.ucr.edu_-7Eheraty_yanega.html&d=AwMD-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=vwMAUPO4eZQ6KZ-JSKmCHcKrmT9OCkQnhY5yo4oQ9TE&s=gW1fnlhUmwcSJWwetl4lJu7drsNTMhAchXZ--SYUeOw&e=">http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html</a>
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82</pre>
</body>
</html>