[Nhcoll-l] support natural history collections -- Citizen Science crowdfunding initiative launched

[Karen Reeds]

Dear Austin:      12/1/2014

Thank you very much for launching this campaign and for giving me a
concrete way to respond to the troubling reports on Herbaria and NhColl
about the drastic loss of support for natural history collections and their
staffs. This seems an imaginative way to start demonstrating the value of
the collections to a much wider audience.

Those collections have been invaluable to me as a historian of science and
medicine and as an exhibition curator. Over and over, I've seen how
exhibition visitors respond to seeing and learning from real specimens. As
a kid, I was lucky enough to take art classes at the University of
Michigan's natural history museum. Now, when I mentor inner-city teens in
Trenton on science projects, my first move is to take them, with their
little sisters and brothers, to the New Jersey State Museum -- they always
see something in those collections that sparks questions they (and I) would
never thought to ask otherwise.

Again, thanks! Just don't stop at 100+ people, please.

Karen
Karen Reeds, PhD, FLS   karenmreeds at gmail.com
Princeton Research Forum, a community of independent scholars:
http://www.princetonresearchforum.org/
Mentor with ScienceMentors 1:1 http://www.sciencementors.org/
Guest curator, "Come into a New World: Linnaeus & America"
American Swedish Historical Museum, Philadelphia, 2007
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton NJ, 2008
Catalogue available from Diana Publications
http://www.dianepublishing.net/Come_Into_a_New_World_p/1422363678.htm  ISBN
1-4223-6367-8





> From: Austin Mast <amast at bio.fsu.edu>
> To: herbaria at nacse.org
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2014 10:04:37 -0500
> Subject: [HERBARIA] Citizen Science crowdfunding initiative launched
> FSU's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium is pleased to announce a crowdfunding
> campaign (Dec 1–15) to raise $2000 to provision six 1-day citizen science
> events in 2015.  The goal is to bring 100+ people from the Tallahassee
> region onto campus to learn about local biodiversity and the role of
> biodiversity specimens in research and education.  The longer-term,
> bigger-picture goal is to develop a new model for sustaining biodiversity
> data creation by providing resources to the nation's 1500 museums,
> universities, field stations, and other institutions with similar
> collections so that they find it easier to do something similar.  Those
> collections together house about a billion specimens—plants, fossils,
> birds, mammals, sponges, insects, etc.  The plan is to establish a virtuous
> circle in which, as the collections engage more people in their local
> communities in the events, the crowdfunding support for those events
> grows.  Visit
> http://spark.fsu.edu/Projects/121/Blazing-a-New-Trail-for-Sustainability-with-Citizen-Science to
> donate and for more information.
> With best regards,
> Austin
> Austin Mast
> ____________________________________
> Associate Professor · Director, Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium · Associate
> Editor, Systematic Biology · Treasurer, American Society of Plant
> Taxonomists · Executive Committee Member, iDigBio, The National Resource
> for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections
> Department of Biological Science · 319 Stadium Drive · Florida State
> University · Tallahassee, FL 32306-4295 · U.S.A.
> Office is King Life Science Building, room 4065 · Lab is King Life Science
> Building, rooms 4068 and 4084 · Herbarium is Biological Science Unit One,
> room 100
> Voice: 1 (850) 645-1500 · Fax:  1 (850) 645-8447 · amast at bio.fsu.edu
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