[Nhcoll-l] Specimens vs assemblies

[Teresa Mayfield]

Paul,

Sorry for the long-winded response!

As a collections manager, do I physically separate the individual specimens
> and send them off to their respective collections (General Invertebrates
> [Cnidaria], Mollusca and General Invertebrates [Crustacea] and [Annelida])
> or preserve the assemblage intact?


I would preserve them intact.

once I catalog the individual taxa into their respective databases, into
> which collection does the assemblage physically go? All four epibionts are
> attached to the sea fan, so that would seem to have the best claim
> to priority as it's both a specimen in its own right and a substrate for
> the others. The problem there is that our General Invertebrates collection
> is not funded, whereas our mollusk collection is. Our neontological
> departments are all taxon-based and each has its own community of curators,
> managers, associates and researchers as well as its own demands on space,
> infrastructure and support.


Ah, a social problem - sort of. Who is willing to care for the entire
assemblage and if willing do they have the resources to do so? I don't have
a good answer here but it does highlight the inequalities between
collections held by a single institution - this is something for
institution-wide discussion. Who decides what is important?

How then does the existence and maintenance of neontological taxon-based
> collections (Entomology, Malacology, Mammalogy etc) configure science? Does
> it encourage the emergence of museum entomologists, malacologists and
> mammalogists over, say, benthic ecologists?


Another social issue. We have institutions that physically manage
everything as if it is a single collection (mostly due to lack of
resources) but they still tend to separate their digital catalogs in Arctos
as you have outlined above. I don't think any method is better than the
other as long as someone studying crabs in the Crustacea collection will
find the ones that are part of your mollusk collection and the other way
around.

Using a single database system throughout an institution is one step to
making discoverability better, the other is using an object tracking system
to denote storage locations so that one can find the crabs no matter which
curator/collection manager is handling them.

Adios,

Teresa J. Mayfield-Meyer
*Arctos <https://arctosdb.org/> Community Coordinator*
*ORCiD - 0000-0002-1970-7044 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1970-7044>*
It's not dead if it has data!
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