[Nhcoll-l] Seeking advice for classification of herbarium specimens in museum

[Peter Rauch]

My only caveat regarding the proportional allocation of existing cabinets
to the existing collection (of 30,000 sheets(?)), is to reassure yourselves
that the existing collection was not built up by "specialty" collecting (of
select families, genera, species) which might easily mis-represent the
eventual taxonomic profile (proportions) of your growing(?) collection.

You will have to estimate how large your collection will be allowed
(funded?) to grow. You mention that your are space-limited, but you don't
indicate whether you've already outgrown your existing collection, your
projected growth, and/or your goals. It's not just where to store the next
specimen, but where/when  to install the next cabinet(s), which might help
you to plan the allocation across taxa of existing shelf space.

Peter

On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Doug Yanega <dyanega at ucr.edu> wrote:

> On 3/2/16 10:17 PM, Huong Lien Tran wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>
> Our museum currently has a small collection of plant specimens (about
> 30000 specimens). Our new curator for the collection is still fairly
> inexperienced in managing them. Therefore, we would like to seek some
> advice on how to effectively store and classify them in a limited storage
> space:
>
>
> - Which system of classification of plant specimens are more commonly used
> in the world nowadays? We are using the list provided in Brummitt 1992 We
> know that in older institutions with bigger collections, the classification
> of specimens should be more complicated. However, with newly established
> museum like us, we are facing with problems of choosing a classification
> system to meet the demand of not only our Vietnamese researchers but also
> foreign ones who frequently have collaboration with us.
>
>
> - Arranging specimens: Currently, we are storing our specimens by family
> in family folder in compactors' shelves becaused of limited floor space,
> and arrange these folders alphabetically. However, we are having
> difficulties in how to arrange them into the limited shelves, since we do
> not have enough shelf for the full list of families in Brummitt or any
> other classification system.
>
> There are even more families of insects (over 1100), and their
> classification is in constant flux, so to keep things stable for curation
> and retrieval, I do two essential things with our collection (of over 3
> million specimens) that I would recommend you also consider: (1) organize
> families phylogenetically and NEVER alphabetically. This is for the simple
> fact that when family names change (as they often do), they are typically
> still *related to the same taxa* they were related to before, so they
> will rarely have to be moved, and often only require a new label and
> nothing more. (2) do not worry about leaving space for families you do not
> have. If you are organizing phylogenetically, then any time a new taxon is
> added, you know exactly where to add it. Our cabinets, for example, have
> complete lists on them, and we only indicate represented families by
> *highlighting* them. Then all it takes is a quick glance at a cabinet
> list to know which families it contains, and which ones it does not. You
> can produce an index to instruct visitors which cabinets contain which
> families, if they are not familiar with the phylogeny, and include archaic
> names (e.g., "Compositae") in the index.
>
> I would also urge you to allocate space based on the actual diversity of
> taxa already represented. That is, count how many samples you have of all
> families, compare that number to the number of spaces you have available,
> and then allocate space *in proportion*. That is, if Asteraceae adds up to
> 8% of your total holdings, then 8% of your total available space should be
> set aside for Asteraceae, and so forth for each taxon. This will increase
> the likelihood that the natural growth of your collection will fill the
> available space with a minimal amount of re-positioning.
>
> I expect others will have other bits of advice, but those are the things I
> consider essential, and they have served me well for nearly 20 years.
>
> Good luck,
>
> --
> 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)
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