[NHCOLL-L:572] Re: Herp collection arrangement

[John E. Simmons]

In my opinion, collections should be arranged for ease of retrievability
of specimens.  Unless you arrange your shelving in branching sequences
you can't do a true phylogenetic arrangement anyway.  Anything less
than branches would be a systematic step backwards.  I have even heard
of  institutions which arrange their collections in orders which promote
"browsing" of the collection, which is contrary to the basic fundamentals
of collection care.  You should browse the catalogs or the database,
NOT the collection!

In any case, we re-arranged our collection a number of years ago in
alphabetical order by family, genus and species.  It worked extremely
well.  When we moved from a facility which had lots of shelving units
in odd places, we made minor re-arrangements to put the less-accessed
parts of the collection in the less-accessible shelving areas.  This has
taken some getting used to, but it is still vastly superior to false phylogenetic
arrangements on linear shelving.  When you have 290,000 specimens
in 25,000 jars (as we do), the ability to quickly find the specimen you
need is important.

--John Simmons
Natural History Museum
University of Kansas

"J. Tomasz Giermakowski" wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> As our division prepares for a move, we have decided to upgrade our much
> out of date arrangement of specimens. Since the last arrangement, families
> have been created and lumped. We are having a debate on whether to arrange
> the families in alphabetical order or follow some kind of phylogenetic
> order established for each order (e.g. Ford and Cannatella 1993 for
> frogs). I was wandering how herp collections are arranged at different
> museums. As far as I know, there is no stadarization of arrangement such
> as that for fishes. I thank you kindly for all the input.
>
> Tom Giermakowski
> Curatorial Assistant
> MSB - Division of Amphibians and Reptiles
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> J. Tom Giermakowski
> Department of Biology                   tel: 505.277.5130
> Castetter Hall 167                      fax: 505.277.0304
> The University of New Mexico            email: tomas at unm.edu
> ALBUQUERQUE, NM 87131-1091, USA         web: biology.unm.edu/~herps/
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^