[Nhcoll-l] Requesting letters of support - Brazil´s National Museum

[Dirk Neumann]

Dear Ruy,

is this request on individual (countless) objects, or on acquisitions 
(inventory units)? Surely nobody counted the fat cells before the 
housekeeper wiped (and discarded) Beuy's famous Fettecke (fat corner), 
even though it was known that he used five kilogrammes of butter to 
produce it. One of the larger German collections also had to use an 
inventory system that was originally designed to register fine arts, but 
also here inventory units were entered (and number of specimens if 
countable).

Hope this helps
Dirk


Am 10.04.2019 um 18:32 schrieb Ruy Alves:
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> As you are aware, on September 2^nd last year the Brazilian National 
> Museum palace (in Rio) burned down but not everything housed in it was 
> lost. Currently rescue parties recover specimens which escaped the 
> fire either intact or with some degree of damage, on a daily basis. 
> Evidently the disaster sparked a series of investigations by Brazilian 
> Authorities (mostly still under way).
>
>             The Brazilian Federal Audit Court (/Tribunal de Contas da 
> União/ - /TCU/), for instance, demands the Museum to produce a full 
> annual inventory of collections.
>
> The Audit Court insists that the Museum disobeyed the law by not 
> implementing complete annual inventories, invoking a law from 2009 
> (see link below) which was quite evidently designed by someone who 
> cared about art museums. To the best of our knowledge you can count 
> statues and pictures by Picasso etc. on the wall with some precision, 
> but not individual diatoms in every vial, plants on every voucher, 
> pinned insects in every drawer.
>
> We have pretty much ceased our research to cope with this unusual 
> demand for overly meticulous inventory from the Audit Court, to the 
> best of our knowledge unprecedented in natural history museums worldwide.
>
> With the aforementioned pointlessness for annual inventory in natural 
> history museums, could you, as an experient 
> curator/director/researcher (and maybe some of your peers we don´t 
> have e-mails of) kindly send us a letter saying so and how your 
> institution deals with Museum input-output? Could you please inform if 
> you do an annual inventory of your collection? This will be of great 
> help for us.
>
> Link to Law 11.904/2009: 
> http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2007-2010/2009/Lei/L11904.htm
>
> With my kind regards!
>
> Ruy José Válka Alves, Curator, R-Herbarium.
>
> *Ruy J. V. Alves*, Prof. Titular, PhD, *Curador do Herbário R*
> *Laboratório de Florística e Biogeografia Insular & Montana*,
> Displaying
> Departamento de Botânica,
> Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,
> Quinta da Boa Vista s./no., São Cristóvão,
> Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 20940-040, BRASIL,
> tel. 21+*39381145*
>
> "/Never put away a specimen unlabeled, not even for an hour, you may 
> forget it or die./" - Elliott Coues - Field and General Ornithology (1890)
>
> For herbarium-related subjects please visit 
> http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/dptbot/herbario.html or e-mail 
> herbarior at gmail.com <mailto:herbarior at gmail.com>
>
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-- 
Dirk Neumann

Tel: 089 / 8107-111
Fax: 089 / 8107-300
*new email: neumann(a)snsb.de*

Postanschrift:

Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns
Zoologische Staatssammlung München
Dirk Neumann, Sektion Ichthyologie / DNA-Storage
Münchhausenstr. 21
81247 München

Besuchen Sie unsere Sammlung:
http://www.zsm.mwn.de/sektion/ichthyologie-home/

---------

Dirk Neumann

Tel: +49-89-8107-111
Fax: +49-89-8107-300
*new email: neumann(a)snsb.de*

postal address:

Bavarian Natural History Collections
The Bavarian State Collection of Zoology
Dirk Neumann, Section Ichthyology / DNA-Storage
Muenchhausenstr. 21
81247 Munich (Germany)

Visit our section at:
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