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

[Dirk Neumann]

Hi all,

the European Consortium of nat. his. Collections is currently developing 
such strategic goals, but they have early draft status at the moment. 
Earlier Position papers are available here: 
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cetaf.org_taxonomy_publications&d=AwID-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=Btwigzn4Ka_ZAZ6_1Uyrwr3f8nanfFzFXqc00-4H37g&s=iwfEUqhMdPmCqf-ccXp5RngTSY0lRrmCi6Sa5UcC2F0&e= 

However, as others already mentioned, at the moment there is a strong 
focus on all those fancy advances (Digitisation, barcoding, etc.), but 
we should not forget about the boring stuff: collections.

Collections are the foundation of all those nice outreaching 
initiatives. And instead of creating soft language on "integration of 
collections" which actually means shutting down and closing of 
collections, loss of taxonomic expertise and conservation knowledge, we 
should be careful not to risk and loose our expertise. Instead, we have 
to develop further, as especially DNA & tissue collections do not only 
need a lot of know-how in a changing legal environment, but also towards 
collection care: for long term storage, we are still in trial mode, 
there are no standards and no best practice.

At the same time, we and our ollections are confronted with a massive 
loss in knowledge (retirement, staff cutting, discontinued preparation 
skills, ...) and problems arising from usage of new techniques (just 
want to mention climate control & air pollutants). So preventive 
conservation should receive not only sufficient recognition in strategic 
plans, but play a vital role.

As siad before: our key business is collections. Without collections, we 
are nothing.

All the best
Dirk


Am 23.01.2015 um 00:38 schrieb 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=AwID-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=Btwigzn4Ka_ZAZ6_1Uyrwr3f8nanfFzFXqc00-4H37g&s=ZzlnhC-WH1xKPGoAEtT-TWvapjeA1gBX9yabVT_MYjo&e= 
>    "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
>          is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
>
>
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-- 
Dirk Neumann

Tel: 089 / 8107-111
Fax: 089 / 8107-300
email: Dirk.Neumann(a)zsm.mwn.de

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---------

Dirk Neumann

Tel: +49-89-8107-111
Fax: +49-89-8107-300
email: Dirk.Neumann(a)zsm.mwn.de

postal address:

Bavarian Natural History Collections
The Bavarian State Collection of Zoology
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