[NHCOLL-L:2336] Re: collection organization

[Doug Yanega]

>Judith,
>Phylogenetic order?  Cool.  Can you send me a photograph of your 
>storage furniture arranged in a branching sequence?  I want to see 
>this.
>
>All kidding aside, collections arranged in phylogenetic order are 
>never really in phylogenetic order because they are linear (unless 
>you are very Aristotelian about your classification system).  We 
>gave up on the faux-phylogenetic order years ago and now have the 
>collection separated into sections using a phylogenetic unit (Order) 
>but within each order the specimens are arranged the alphabetically 
>by family, genus, and species, with a further arrangement within 
>species by geographic unit.  We do not pretend to arrange the Orders 
>in a phylogenetic order.

I don't think one sort of organizational scheme works for all sorts 
of collections. I think the merit of a given approach (what is most 
efficient for a collection) depends entirely upon the stability of 
the higher classification of the group involved. Since you work with 
vertebrates, for example, I don't imagine you see the same incessant 
turnover in the creation of new families and the dissolution of old 
ones as I do in insects (there are roughly 1000 different insect 
families, and something on the order of 10-20 changes annually in 
this list). We used to arrange our insect collection alphabetically 
by family within each order, and this was impossible to maintain in 
anything resembling a timely fashion; we were at least 30 years 
behind in classification simply because no one had the time to 
reshuffle one to several hundred drawers of insects every time a 
family was split up or coalesced (e.g., the recent division of 
Scarabaeidae into 10 separate families, or the inclusion of 4 other 
families into the Staphylinidae, or the restructuring of the 
Curculionoidea). We reorganized to "faux-phylogenetic" (alphabetic 
within superfamilies, superfamilies done phylogenetically) when we 
got a compactor system, and now changes in family placement only 
require minimal reshuffling of drawers and specimens.

So, for insects, at least, I believe a superfamily-based grouping 
scheme is vastly superior to order-level. I'd even go a bit further 
though, and - efficiency of curation aside - point out that it 
*always* makes it easier for people working in a collection when 
closely-related families are placed in proximity to one another, 
rather than scattered around simply because they reside in different 
parts of the alphabet. It even allows one to have a place for 
specimens that are identified only to superfamily, which is often 
very helpful, at least in insects (and not possible under an 
"alphabetic by family" system). If there are few families in any 
given order, or few specimens, then this won't be an issue, but for 
the 5 major insect orders that's not the case.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82