History of a fragmented natural history collection: A case study of Merzifon Anatolia College Museum

This study was carried out to gauge the current status of natural history collection centres in Malaysia, primarily focused on animal collections. Part of the research is reported here and it constituted objective one which is to compare the status of natural history collection between the various centres in Malaysia and also with three selected Southeast Asian tropical region museums in trying to understand need of the Malaysian public for a natural history museum. It maps out the locations, describes the number and kinds of specimens kept at each collection centre. Financial and governance aspects are also described. In total 11 centres were visited all over Malaysia. These collection centres and museums were managed by federal or state government or universities. Duration of visit at each location ranged from one to seven days. During the visit interviews were carried out with collection manager to obtained Questionnaire was also left behind for managers of centre to fill in and sent back to researchers. In addition, three natural history collection centres and museums in South East Asia tropical region were also visited: Bogor Zoological Museum, Indonesia; Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore and Mahachakri Sirindhorn Natural History Museum, Prince of Songkhla University, Thailand. Following the same protocol as with Malaysian centres, the information obtained enable researcher to make comparison between Malaysia and those in the region. This paper found that most of the natural history museums and collection centres were focused in the centre of peninsular Malaysia. However, natural history collections in Malaysia are still limited by state and national borders. Coordination and integration of these centres, currently runned separately by the federal, state governments, research institutions and institution of higher learning, is seen as the way forward to provide for a strong basis of understanding biodiversity among the Malaysian public.

Several initiatives aim to map the diversity of Natural History (NH) collections and standardise their descriptions. The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories (GRBio) is the most recent global registry. Unfortunately the server has been down since mid-2018 but the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) recently "rescued" this data. In addition to this, the One World Collection exercise is a set of high-level collection descriptors (size, group coverage and geographic distribution) supporting a common strategy between the largest world institutions. Despite these efforts, a large part of the NH collections remains digitally unavailable and digitisation at the specimen level will take several decades. A new NH collections dashboard is needed in order to harmonise the efforts of the institutions. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) is a good place to introduce this excercise. CETAF’s members hold over half of the world’s NH collections, representing 80% of the world's bio- and geo-diversity. Most of these collections are now engaged in the preparation for the common process of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo, European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure). Additionally in Belgium, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA), Meise Botanic Garden (MBG) and CETAF have joined efforts to set up a common research portal (Natural Heritage, BRAIN-be project). The goal is to link together several collection management systems (CMS) and to (re)create links between isolated collection items. The CETAF collections dashboard splits the information into small metadata units related to topics relevant to the collections (taxonomy, geographic distribution, digitisation strategy and coverage, stratigraphy, etc.). The model allows for the creation of new units without a complete modification of the database structure. All units are defined by the Dublin Core and by fields derived from the Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG) d2.3 deliverable (van Egmond et al. 2019). The object hierarchy allows for the creation of sub-collections and preserves the unity of the information. The CMS has an internal object database with a full index and a faceted search interface. It also has web services and XLS (Microsoft® Excel®) import/export functionalities. The collection dashboard also includes a complete workflow and access rights management at the object level. This is important for the information that is protected by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The dashboard is now being evaluated with the collections hosted by the partners of Natural Heritage. The system will be proposed to CETAF members and connections will be established with the international portals such as the GBIF or the future DiSSCo portal.

The Smithsonian Transcription Center (TC) is a transcription platform for a wide variety of collection items for the Smithsonian museums and units. The National Museum of Natural History (NAANH) collection items present a unique challenge for the TC, as the labels on these items contain a variety of information, requiring a complex transcription template. In addition, the transcribed collection data must be imported back to the NAANH database (EAAu Museum Management System) with prescribed formatting. The Departments of Botany and Entomology at NMNH have worked with the TC through these challenges to create a workflow that addresses these issues while providing high-quality data at a rapid rate. Suggestions for further improvement are examined as well.

In Portugal, natural history museums and collections associated with secondary schools are still relatively unknown, notwithstanding that such institutions hold important collections, almost intact since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although vulnerable today, they held a remarkable importance to the teaching practices of life and earth sciences. Using the natural history collection of the Military College of Lisbon as a main source and point of departure, its creation, development, enlargement and use are examined, underlying the crucial role of material culture as primary source. The study of this teaching collection allows a deeper understanding of how biological and geological sciences were taught in Portuguese secondary schools, reflecting the changing approaches of science teaching in Portugal and highlighting the importance of circulation, local exchanges and global networks in the construction of spaces for science teaching.

More than tools for managing physical and digital objects, museum collection management systems (CMS) serve as platforms for structuring, integrating, and making accessible the rich data embodied by natural history collections. Here we describe Arctos, a scalable community solution for managing and publishing global biological, geological, and cultural collections data for research and education. Specific goals are to: (1) Describe the core features and implementation of Arctos for a broad audience with respect to the biodiversity informatics principles that enable high quality research; (2) Highlight the unique aspects of Arctos; (3) Illustrate Arctos as a model for supporting and enhancing the Digital Extended Specimen concept; and (4) Emphasize the role of the Arctos community for improving data discovery and enabling cross-disciplinary, integrative studies within a sustainable governance model. In addition to detailing Arctos as both a community of museum professionals and a collection database platform, we discuss how Arctos achieves its richly annotated data by creating a web of knowledge with deep connections between catalog records and derived or associated data. We also highlight the value of Arctos as an educational resource. Finally, we present the financial model of fiscal sponsorship by a nonprofit organization, implemented in 2022, to ensure the long-term success and sustainability of Arctos.

This paper details the salting-out method, which uses the salts potassium carbonate and sodium chloride to distinguish between the three most commonly used fluid preservatives: ethanol, isopropanol, and formalin. A summary of other methods to identify fluid preservative type and a review of the salting-out method published by Mayfield (2013, Distinguishing between ethanol and isopropanol in natural history collection fluid storage, Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, https://spnhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Mayfieldfinalwithtablechanges.pdf) are provided. A new salting-out method is presented, which requires a small fluid sample (2–4 ml). It is simple, quick, and relatively inexpensive to implement, making it a viable method to distinguish between common fluid preservatives. The materials and equipment for the salting-out test cost just over $100 US, and tests take approximately 3 minutes per container. Results of testing on known concentrations and combinations of ethanol, isopropanol, and formalin (a solution of formaldehyde in water) and on samples of fluid preservatives from specimen containers in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum collections are presented. The results of salting-out tests have been verified by direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) (Cody et al., 2005, Versatile new ion source for the analysis of materials in open air under ambient conditions, Analytical Chemistry 77(8):2297–302), which confirmed the results of salting-out tests but also highlighted some limitations, particularly when combinations of fluid preservative are encountered.

The world's natural history collections represent a vast repository of information on the natural and cultural world, collected over 250 years of human exploration, and distributed across institutions on six continents. These collections provide a unique tool for answering fundamental questions about biological, geological and cultural diversity and how they interact to shape our changing planet. Recent advances in digital and genomic technologies promise to transform how natural history collections are used, especially with respect to addressing scientific and socio-economic challenges ranging from biodiversity loss, invasive species and food security, to climate change, scarce minerals, and emerging tropical diseases. It is not clear, however, how ready these collections are to meet this challenge because relatively little is known about their size, composition or geographical distribution. Similarly, relatively little is known about the extent, expertise or demography of their curatorial workforce. To address these questions, a large collaborative team of directors and scientists have collated a global database on natural history collections that comprises more than 70 of the world's largest institutions, including museums, botanic gardens, research institutes and universities. The institutions represented in the database span Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America, with approximately one third of institutions from each of the Global South, Europe and North America. The database includes information on the number of specimens and experts with respect to both geographic regions and collection categories and geographic regions. Geographic regions include both the terrestrial and marine realms, and collection categories span anthropology, botany, entomology, geology, paleobiology, and vertebrate and invertebrate zoology. Analyses of this new database reveal that the global natural history collection represents one of the most extensive distributed scientific infrastructures in the world, comprising more than 1 billion specimens that are curated by a workforce of more than 7,000 individuals. The analyses also indicate, however, that a major change in approach is required for these collections to realize their potential to inform future decision making and stimulate the basic research that underpins future questions and knowledge. For instance, at a global scale the collection and expertise does indeed exist to map change in key groups and regions - but this requires large-scale coordination across institutions and countries. Similarly, cross-institution collaboration is required to fill strategic gaps in the collection, particularly for tropical, marine and polar regions. And finally, there is an urgent need for coordinated investment in digital and genomic technologies to make collections available to the global research community and link them with other sources of information. The vast majority of collection information currently exists as 'dark data'. We conclude that the global natueral history collection comprises one of the most extensive distributed scientific infrastructures in the world, but a major change in approach is required for them to realize their potential to inform future decision making. In particular, natural history collections need to work more effectively together to develop a global strategy, create a common data platform, accelerate the availability and use of specimen data and pursue major new collecting programs.

The costs of describing the entire animal kingdom

Natural history collections and museums made their appearance in the Ottoman in late 19th century through various attempts to build collections through field excursions, donations and exchanges among researchers, individuals and institutions around the world. Among them, the Imperial Medical School of the Ottoman Empire, schools of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and other American educational groups and French colleges stand out with their vast collections from various parts of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. While these museums were created and built by eminent curators and researchers, a considerable amount of work was carried out by uncredited staff and the students. The history of these museums was often obscured by catastrophic events such as the great fires in Istanbul, the passing of the curators and other administrators and, particularly, the devastating effects of the First World War. However, long-lasting commercial science objects networks and the establishment of global natural history collections and museums are still operational today, supported by scientific exchange between other countries and the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing an outline of the history of the natural history collections of the Ottoman Empire can shed light on the evolution of both the naturalistic movement within the Ottoman society and an embryonic scientific network around the Middle East and the rest of the world.

The Bohemian National Museum was officially founded in 1822. It had been under preparation since 1818 by its founders, Kaspar Sternberg (1761–1838) and Franz Sternberg-Manderscheid (1764–1830), with the intention of preserving the nation's cultural heritage of scientific and historical collections so as to form a national monument as well as to enhance the population's awareness of their national identity. Research programmes on the collections were co-ordinated with those of other institutions and scientists within and beyond the Habsburg monarchy. Such co-operation, mainly scientific, rather than cultural, was often carried out without official sanction and formed the beginnings of ‘extra-museal’ scientific networking in central Europe. This paper traces the paths of the collected specimens from their accession to their publication; it also analyses the implication of scientific networks in terms of their benefit to the Museum's scientific collections and its position as a national status symbol.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake revealed that one of the reasons for the lack of effective and timely action to rescue and restore natural history collections is that the organizational laws and policies are insufficient and inapplicable under extreme circumstances. Laws and policies for collections are primarily concerned with designation and registration, preservation and management, financial assistance, government involvement and public awareness. The Cultural Property Protection System and the Act on Cultural Properties Preservation prioritized the rescue and restoration of cultural assets, both nationally and regionally, however, attention to the state of natural history collections was delayed and was primarily fueled by volunteers (Mawatari 2015). Earlier in the Meiji era (1868~1912), national emphasis on cultural assets, represented by Japanese art, contributed to the formation and spread of nationalism (Kanayama 2011). Consequently, the laws and policies in question were enacted, focusing on attaching importance to and preservervation of cultural assets. After a few attempts at national discussion on whether science specimens (in natural history collections) should be covered by the law, the problem remain unsolved. In the few cases, where natural history collections were designated by the law, the focus tended to be centered on the value to humanity. It is clear from the laws and policies that decision-makers lack an understanding of the importance of natural history collections. Further narrowing down the scope, operational rules and regulations are often based on the handling and practices of cultural history objects within the public museums, and descriptions of natural history collections are lacking in many practice guidelines for museums and textbooks on museum studies. Other than the need for better law and policy, the 2011 disaster has also left curators of natural history collections with a renewed sense of the importance of establishing theories on conservation science and other practice standards for natural history collections through networking and cooperation, not only under extreme circumstances but also for daily management and practical utility. However, the current lack of curators with expertise in natural history collections, the few chances to participate in skill-share programs, and insufficient financial and official support for pioneering research, remain challenging. To address this, it may be possible to propose methodologies and gather individuals with similar interests to deepen the debate on the importance of research and establishment of standards to give curators more chances, support and recognition to carry on conservation science research. Therefore, increasing connections within the natural history museum community is a feasible step to take in the near term. There are some actions in progress such as cross-museum collaboration to establish research projects and the skill-share projects organized by the Natural History Museum Network of Western Japan. What about the non-natural history museums and natural history collections with few or without specialized curators? The natural history curator community in Japan is small. In 2020, there were 228 museums in Japan holding biological specimens (geological and paleontology specimens were not counted in the research), fewer than half of which were assigned to natural history curators. In the natural history museums, the average number of natural history curators was 2.49; that of science museums, history museums and regional museums was less than 1, indicating that the natural history curator community is a minority in the museum sector of Japan (Fig. 1, Japanese Association of Museums 1986). Even those where there were assignments of natural history curators, the curators' specialized field may not be a perfect match with the collections, ending up with cases such as a curator of entomology having to take care of botanical specimens. In some regions, in 2020, there were only one or two natural history curators, indicating the unevenness in curator assignments across regions of Japan (Fig. 2, Japanese Association of Museums 1986). This makes it even harder to find other curators who can help when encountering problems beyond one’s expertise. All of this underlines the importance of creating a strong national network of natural history museum curators to share experiences, expertise, methodologies, and standards of care.

The German Council of Science and Humanities provides advice to the German government and states on the structure and development of higher education and research. In January 2011, the Council presented recommendations on scientific collections as research infrastructures. This article summarizes the results of the proposal and their implications on university museums and collections. Introduction In January 2011, the German Council of Science and Humanities, which provides advice to the German government and states on the structure and development of higher education and research, presented recommendations on scientific collections as research infrastructures. In this article, I will summarize the recommendations and their implications on university museums and collections. I will begin by providing a brief overview of the situation and recent developments of university collections in Germany, which have undoubtedly contributed to the recent accomplished evaluation. The situation of university collections in Germany In 2001, after detailed inquiries on the collections of Humboldt University of Berlin leading to the exhibition “Theatre of Nature and Art. Treasure-Trove of Knowledge”, I realized that an overview of collections existing in German universities had not been done before. This observation led to a research project on the holdings and history of university collections in Germany. In 2004, the German Research Foundation (DFG) accepted the application and awarded the project five-year funding. Simultaneously, I tried to increase the visibility of university museums through presentations, publications, and advocacy (e.g. WEBER 2009, 2010). In 2009, when the working group on research infrastructures for scientific collections set up by the German Council of Science and Humanities started to look at scientific collections, it could rely on a database for university collections with more than 1,000 entries, whereof more than one-third were already dissolved, no longer existing at the original university, of unknown destiny, or orphaned. In 2010, the Helmholtz Center for the Kulturtechniken organized for the first time a conference in Germany addressing people working in and with university collections. The symposium, called University Museums and Collections in Academic Practice. Tasks – Concepts – Perspectives, aimed at: identifying new tasks for university museums and collections, and developing strategies to guarantee their continued existence. The meeting also set itself the task of framing futureoriented concepts to allow for a fuller integration of traditional university collections into 1 Wissenschaftsrat: Recommendations on Scientific Collections as Research Infrastructures. [Empfehlungen zu wissenschaftlichen Sammlungen als Forschungsinfrastuktur.]. Drs. 10464-11. Berlin 28 January 2011. www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/ archiv/10464-11-11_engl.pdf, www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/10464-11 11_engl.pdf (accessed September 5, 2011). 2 www2.hu-berlin.de/hzk/theatrum/englisch/index.html (accessed September 5, 2011). 3 www.universitaetssammlungen.de/ (accessed September 5, 2011). 4 universitaetsmuseen.hu-berlin.de/ (accessed September 5, 2011).

This paper investigates the history and aim of the Ghent University Zoology Museum on a whole, and looks at the achievements of its more interesting directors and curators in specific. In 1817 Ghent University purchased a natural history collection in order to illustrate the lectures. Anatomy and zoology were taught in sciences and medicine by people of importance to the university, and the Flemish community. The paper stresses on the specific views of the directors, e.g. Professor F. Plateau was convinced that anatomy was best studied by dissecting animals yourself. Very important to the University, Flemish community and the city of Ghent, McLeod introduced Dutch as the teaching language. This didactic collection struggled between the Great War and World War II, but from the late 1990s evolved into a museum on demand, introducing science communication within and outside the university, and eventually growing into a workshop centre promoting the scientific method and critical

The Natural History Museum Vienna is one of the most important museums of natural history in the world. Its collections date back to the year 1750, when the Emperor Franz Stephan of Lorraine (Franz I. Stephan) purchased (from Italy) what was then the largest and most famous collection of natural history specimens. The meteorite collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, has the longest history of all comparable collections in the world. In the second half of the eighteenth century, soon after the foundation of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1750, the Viennese curators began to collect meteorites. Although the first curators neither believed in the extraterrestrial origin nor accepted—in several cases—the written and witnessed histories of these allegedly “heavenly” stone and iron masses, they preserved them in the Natural History collection. Among the first acquisitions were the historical important meteorites Hraschina (Agram), Tabor, Krasnojarsk (Pallas iron), and Eichstädt. These and other well-documented specimens from the Vienna collection were, for example, used by E.F.F. Chladni for his seminal treatises of 1794 and 1819, respectively. The central figure in the early history of the collection is Carl von Schreibers (1775–1852). After the fall of the Stannern meteorite in 1808, he availed himself of every opportunity to acquire meteorite specimens. His continued interest in meteorites laid the foundation for the Vienna collection to be of the historical and scientific importance it is today. Due to the efforts of Schreibers, who also is regarded as founder of meteoritic science in Vienna, and his successors, the Vienna collection became the largest and most extensive in the course of the nineteenth century. In terms of the geological and paleontological collections, early expeditions and collecting campaigns were mainly targeting exotic animals and plants, while paleontological objects were welcome but subordinate. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the paleontological collections were—literally and figuratively speaking—systematically enlarged. Internationalization and diversification became the focus of the collection strategy. The paleontology collections at the Vienna museum also became important in the Darwinian view of evolution.

Natural history collections are now being championed as key to broad ecological studies, especially those involving human impacts in the Anthropocene. However, collections are going through a crisis that threatens their present and future value, going beyond underfunding/understaffing to a more damaging practice: current researchers are no longer depositing material. This seems to be especially true for ecological studies that now benefit from historical collections, as those researchers are not trained to think about voucher specimens. We investigated indexed journals in Ecology and Zoology to assess if they have guidelines concerning voucher specimens. Only 4% of ecological journals presently encourage (but mostly do not require) voucher deposition, while 15% of zoological journals encourage it. In the first place, this goes contrary to scientific standards of reproducibility, since specimens are primary data. Secondly, this erodes the legacy we will leave for future researchers, because if this trend goes on unchecked, it will leave a massive gap in collections' coverage, undermining the quality that is presently acclaimed. The scientific community needs a wakeup call to avoid impoverishing the future value of natural history collections. Training and changing researchers' mindsets is essential, but that takes time. For the moment, we propose a stopgap measure: at the minimum, academic journals should encourage authors to deposit specimens in open collections, such as museums and universities.