[Nhcoll-l] Strategic plan/vision for the collection community

[Doug Yanega]

On 1/22/15 7:39 AM, Sublett, Clayton wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Our collection is working on a strategic plan, and, as much as 
> possible, I would like to work in goals of the natural history 
> collections community.  Does anyone know if there is a strategic 
> vision for natural history collections/museums? The Organization for 
> Biological Field Stations handed out a strategic vision at their 2013 
> meeting, and I was hoping something like this existed for 
> collections.  Beyond the push to database, digitize, and make 
> collection data available online, I'm not sure about the goals of the 
> community.  Any advice or input would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
As others have already commented, though without much elaboration, it 
strikes me that as a community most of our "strategy" boils down to 
little more than damage control. Someone publishes a paper in Science 
accusing collections-based scientists of driving species to extinction, 
and we scramble to mobilize a rebuttal; some adminstrators somewhere 
decide to shut down a major collection, and we scramble to flood them 
with letters of support for the threatened collection. Rinse and repeat. 
On the whole, we are generally on the defensive, and we either hold our 
ground, or lose it - we never seem to advance - and that is about all 
the exposure we can expect to get. The average person is more interested 
in reading their horoscope than in reading anyone's mission statement, 
so unless we are acting in the role of protesting something, and gaining 
visibility thereby, no one is likely to pay any attention to us ("Don't 
it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's 
gone"). Even within our own institutions, the higher administrative 
levels tend to treat everything like a business, and very few 
collections - especially if they have few or no public displays - 
actually generate profit, and collections (like libraries) are therefore 
more likely to be viewed as a form of charitable public service, to be 
supported only so long as we don't cost TOO much to maintain, relative 
to our PR value. It isn't clear to me, then, how any amount of advocacy 
can really counteract such a fundamental and unavoidable fact; most 
collections do not generate more revenue than they consume, and never 
will. From an administrator's point of view, a collection is a hole into 
which money pours but never comes back out. How can we make real 
advances and promote our interests when we owe our existence to what 
amounts to charitable forbearance?

More worrisome still, I will note that even within the community that we 
serve, the role of traditional collections-based science is being 
increasingly downplayed; the document Ellen Paul linked earlier, for 
example, makes no explicit reference to legacy material or vouchered 
specimens. There are many references to "knowledge" and "information" 
and "data" (as well as three uses of the term "molecular"), but nothing 
at all about museums or specimens. One can only presume that this 
reflects an increasing number of systematists who do not feel that their 
work requires any such infrastructure. In essence, every single point in 
the stated agenda can be accomplished without requiring the actual 
physical archival of (or reference to) whole organismal specimens, 
maintained in public depositories. If the explicit vision for the future 
of systematics as a discipline extols the virtues of molecular data but 
does not mention museums, then we are facing a much deeper problem than 
being misunderstood by our administrators; we are possibly looking at a 
future where the taxonomic community that we have served for centuries 
considers us irrelevant and archaic. Of the many taxonomists that have 
visited our collection in the last several years, a fair number had 
little or no interest in seeing or borrowing specimens that are more 
than 10 years old, because they only wanted material from which they 
could potentially extract DNA - and I imagine that trend will continue. 
How long can we argue to maintain legacy material if we can't even point 
to taxonomists that rely upon it?

Sincerely,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__cache.ucr.edu_-7Eheraty_yanega.html&d=AwIC-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=vwMAUPO4eZQ6KZ-JSKmCHcKrmT9OCkQnhY5yo4oQ9TE&s=gW1fnlhUmwcSJWwetl4lJu7drsNTMhAchXZ--SYUeOw&e= 
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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