[Nhcoll-l] NPS asking for info on your collections?

[Carrie Eaton]

Ellen - Oh absolutely, 25-30 years is not "long" for the life of the 
collection, but a better option for smaller museums with limited 
staffing who are unlikely to be given the 'indefinite' option. The 
loaning and destructive sampling stipulations may also be easier to 
negotiate for a geology/paleontology collection than a biological one. 
My colleague on campus who works in the Anthropology collection was able 
to negotiate curating fees for all of their protected specimens - but 
things that fall under NAGPRA are considered much higher priority than, 
say, a drawer of invertebrate fossils. We have an incredibly small staff 
(as I am the only full time collections person) so the cataloging 
project would have been overwhelmingly cumbersome had we not achieved a 
cooperative financial agreement with the Park Service - likely also a 
rare occurrence. I do agree with you that the interactions with 
different park managers are not totally uniform from park to park or 
institution to institution, which is interesting, considering it is 
their aim to get to a unified national catalog someday. A larger museum 
with a larger staff and collection might be able to put down their foot 
and hold out for more control over their NPS specimens, but my primary 
point was that (depending on the park, I suppose) the terms of the 
"repository agreement" are in fact negotiable and can be rewritten to 
satisfy your own collections management needs - if you ask for it! If 
you have your results from your '02 survey - I would be incredibly 
interested in reading them.
best,
Carrie

On 11/8/2012 10:14 AM, Ellen Paul wrote:
> Thanks, Carrie, for this valuable info. Just a couple of observations:
>
> 1. As all agreed at that 2008 summit I wrote about, in museum 
> collection terms, 25-30 years is not long-term. In people terms, yes, 
> but in terms of the collection itself, it is not.
> 2. Your repository agreement seems to be unusual, especially with 
> regard to loans and destructive sampling.
> 3. The problem with the repository agreement generally is that 
> regardless of length, it ultimately allows the removal and relocation 
> of specimens or entire collections without any say on the part of the 
> museum. One of the key areas of discussion at the 2008 summit is that 
> the location of a specimen is based on the underlying reason for its 
> collection and on the scientific purpose for collections generally. 
> Mere physical proximity to a given park, or the desire to put all 
> specimens from a given park in one location would result in reduction 
> of the integrity of the collection for which it was originally 
> collected. So the most obvious  - a series intended to examine clinal 
> variation will have specimens from locations along the cline, some of 
> which may have been collected from one or more parks. If someone now 
> decides that they want all specimens collected from those parks to be 
> in one location, then these series are disrupted. Conversely, if the 
> purpose of the collecting was to document the biodiversity of the 
> park, then removal of one or more specimens for the purpose, say (I am 
> obviously making this up) of creating a collection of all birds found 
> in national parks will undermine the integrity of the collection that 
> documented the biodiversity of the park.
> 4. The designation of institutions as federal repositories is part of 
> what has fueled this worry I described. The rumors have been 
> circulating for years that the NPS was going to either build its own 
> warehouses - and yes, I use that term deliberately - or designate 
> certain museums in various regions of the country - and consolidate 
> the specimens collected on units of public land managed by the 
> National Park Service - in those centers.
> 5. I can't speak to your institution's policies or differences between 
> geology and biological collections, but most biological collections 
> actually prohibit long-term or even indefinite loans. Call it a 
> repository agreement, but it's really a long-term loan.
>
> Generally, the repository agreements place a fairly stiff burden on 
> the museums to provide a substantial service but offer no remuneration 
> for those services. Yes, remuneration is clearly NOT the primary 
> purpose of housing and curating a collection, but the point is that 
> acting as a repository is limiting in various ways. Starting with 
> integration of the specimens. If you may have to give it all back in X 
> years, are you going to integrate hundreds or thousands of specimens 
> into your collections or are you going to keep it segregated?
>
> I didn't receive Peter's email from yesterday, but this issue of NPS 
> numbers has been part of the discussion from the beginning and it 
> would be very burdensome for most collections to go back and attach a 
> second label to each of the specimens and then record that second 
> number. It also flies in the face of current practice, which is to 
> assign unique identifiers (can of worms, I know). There are simpler 
> ways to deal with this than to add labels/tags and new numbers. Add a 
> field in the permanent record that identifies the item as having been 
> collected in a NP.
>
> Yes, over the years, the park-level people have been very reasonable, 
> even if their practices were not conforming to NPS policy. If I had a 
> dime for every time I've been told "the manager at Park X told us not 
> to worry about it, as far as he was concerned, we own it and they will 
> never ask for it back and we can do whatever we want with it." Some of 
> you may remember that back when I was with AIBS, I did a survey on 
> this - 2002. Yes, 10 years ago. I will try to dig up the results, but 
> as best I can recall, about 1/2 the respondents were surprised to 
> learn that there was even an issue, because the manager at the park 
> where they worked told them something to this effect.
>
> Ellen
> Ellen Paul
> Executive Director
> The Ornithological Council
> Email:ellen.paul at verizon.net
> "Providing Scientific Information about Birds"
> http://www.nmnh.si.edu/BIRDNET"

-- 
/*Carrie Eaton*/

/*Curator, UW Geology Museum*/

/1215 W. Dayton Street/

/Madison, WI 53706/

/(608) 262.4912/

*/carrie at geology.wisc.edu/*

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