[Nhcoll-l] Natural history museum controversies?

[Alexandria Sun]

First time responding to a thread here.

Would the loss of French herbarium specimens due to Australia’s customs policies a few years back be relevant here?

https://camd.org.au/quarantine-herbarium-destruction-protocol/ <https://camd.org.au/quarantine-herbarium-destruction-protocol/>

Alexandria Sun

alexandriasun.weebly.com


> On Oct 14, 2020, at 3:30 PM, Omega Smith <acsmith777 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I know you specified *published*, so the farthest I professionally and personally can help you with the deplorable conditions in which collections at a certain museum were kept - conditions which I not only witnessed, but spent a year trying to ameliorate (as a worker there I only had so much power to give the fossil and mineral collections a safe environment, ironically). On the other hand, I believe I stil have somewhere at least one photograph of the black mold in one of the collections rooms and the video I took where I took a screw out of the floor of another collection that was extremely rusted due to recurring human waste flooding within that room. 
> 
> If you are asking for the sake of showing students what not to do, then I would suggest we talk about it sometime. I had mentioned these collection conditions (there are much more problems than the above) to the director at a previous museum for which I worked and he asked if I would tell him more about it so HE could warn students about some of the worst things that can happen to a collection.
> 
> As far as the dirty laundry take - for that reason you will have a far harder time finding published material on this subject than unpublished, authoritative information. Let me know if you'd like to hear the information I have.
> 
> Dr. Omega Smith
> acsmith777 at gmail.com <mailto:acsmith777 at gmail.com>
> 
> 
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