[Nhcoll-l] outsourcing specimen prep

[Doug Yanega]

>Upper management at my institute would like to being outsourcing all 
>specimen preparation:  study skins of vertebrates, spirits for herps 
>and fish, paleo and geo, inverts, everything (except plants, maybe) 
>to save money.   I was curious if any other institutes  has done 
>this or has experience with anything like this?  Personally, I think 
>it is a bad idea (and it seems most folks here agree) but I would 
>love to know if anyone is trying this.

My two cents:

(1) The tasks you list here are so diverse that there is no way you 
will find a single person or institution or company that can perform 
all of them. As such, this will increase the logistical expenses 
involved in shipping, as well as increasing the bureaucratic 
paperload in creating and tracking such a large number of loans - and 
don't forget the processing of payments to all those different folks 
- administrative overhead might not be trivial.

(2) You may have extreme difficulty locating anyone willing and able 
to perform some of these services - either in a timely manner, or 
maybe at all. If you do not know, for a fact, that such services 
*are* available for hire, then the whole premise is based on a very 
unsafe assumption. On top of which, what guarantee is there that 
these people *would* do the work cheaper or better than in-house 
staff? I imagine that you are likely to find only a very few of these 
tasks can actually be reliably outsourced.

(3) Even if you can locate people willing to perform the jobs, 
following point #1 above, they are likely to be in a diversity of 
countries, each of which may have a variety of regulations governing 
the import/export of different classes of natural history materials - 
and some of these regulations may dramatically increase the costs, if 
permits must be paid for, or hazmat shipping costs might be involved.

(4) Aside from the complications that such regulations might create 
even when they are all well-known and possible to comply with, we are 
ALL painfully aware that a million different things can happen that 
can result in the loss, confiscation, theft, damage, or destruction 
of natural history specimens during shipment. Why send a specimen 
abroad if it can be processed in-house, even when that in-house 
processing might be slightly more costly? How willing are your 
administrators to risk losing any of these specimens? Is it worth 
sending out an irreplaceable specimen to save a few dollars when 
there is a significant risk of it being damaged, or lost forever? 
This particular point is different from the preceding three because a 
dollar value for risk *cannot* be calculated.

I would be very surprised if your administrators have taken any of 
these points into account, and they are not trivial issues.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (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