[Nhcoll-l] Cataloging incoming material

[Douglas Yanega]

On 3/27/23 9:48 AM, Callomon,Paul wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> Here’s a question: roughly how many new lots do you catalog in a year? 
> Please include in your reply (a) what kind of collection it is and (b) 
> how many lots it already has. I’m interested to see where you find 
> bottlenecks in this workflow:
>
> Physically receive material – catalog material – rehouse material – 
> distribute material into the collection
>
> Also: roughly how much uncataloged backlog do you have (as a 
> percentage of the cataloged collection)?
>
As briefly as possible:

We acquire an extremely variable number of "lots" of insect specimens 
each year, maybe as few as 20, to over 50, each lot varying from a 
single specimen to over 1000 (in terms of what we extract during 
processing), though many unprocessed samples can easily be in excess of 
10,000 total specimens. The total number of specimens we are able to 
mount ranges from about 10K-40K in a given year, and every specimen is 
databased with a GUID (but not imaged). The major bottleneck is mounting 
specimens, as most of the material is given to us in the form of bulk 
samples. The bulk samples can take a day or two each to be sorted, after 
which they have to be dehydrated (under a fume hood) and mounted, which 
can take weeks for larger lots. Once mounted, the specimen labeling and 
databasing is relatively quick, and specimens can be sorted to order or 
family and placed into the collection quickly. ID below order or family, 
however, can take decades, and that's an entirely *separate* sort of 
bottleneck.

We have over 560,000 specimens that have been databased, out of a 
collection of over 4 million specimens. Of the databased material, which 
includes nearly everything acquired in the last 25 years, about 400,000 
have been georeferenced; over 150,000 of these are identified to genus 
level or better.

I estimate that we have at least another 3 million specimens in our 
unprocessed backlog in our freezers, and this grows slowly but steadily; 
we cannot quite keep pace, as I am the only full-time staff (in that 
respect, we may have the highest ratio of specimens to full-time staff 
of any natural history museum, an over 4 million to 1 ratio, *not* 
counting bulk samples).

Peace,

-- 
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://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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