Aspects Of Curation Research Articles

Enabling Advanced Multi-Modal Neuroimaging Analysis within a Trusted Research Environment

IntroductionGlobally, 55 million individuals have dementia, with an increasing annual incident of 10 million. Enabling the development of new multi-modal models can improve the current diagnostic pathways and potentially contribute to early diagnosis and treatment of dementia. Here, we report how multi-modal resources is achieved within the successful Trusted Research Environment (TRE). ObjectivesWe aimed to identify the challenges of the storage, distribution and analysis of neuroimaging data and how we could implement a comprehensive infrastructure to deal with these. The problems we specifically aimed to address were how to: anonymise scans, store large amounts of data, standardise datasets to a common format, extract metadata, provision the data, and allow for analysis. MethodsWe document various stages and capacities required for multi-modal neuroimaging analysis for dementia and conclude that achieving research ready assets to enable neuroimaging analysis for dementia from existing resources requires an engineered process to facilitate multiple aspects of curation, provisioning and large-scale analysis. ResultsWe developed an ingest pipeline for neuroimaging data to meet the requirements set out in the objectives. This involved standardising all datasets to the Brain Imaging Data Structure, defacing scans and anonymising data, using MinIO for data storage and extracting metadata from header information for data discovery and provisioning. ConclusionThe neuroimaging ingest pipeline developed has allowed for the distribution of imaging datasets within DPUK which has facilitated multi-modal research on anonymised and standardised data and enabled linkage with phenotypic and genomic data.

2264-PUB: Progress in Curating Gene–Disease Relationships by the ClinGen Monogenic Diabetes Expert Panel

Diagnosing and distinguishing monogenic diabetes, including some MODY (maturity-onset diabetes of the young), from type 1 or type 2 diabetes can have profound clinical implications: sulfonylureas vs. insulin or metformin for HNF1A- and HNF4A- diabetes, and no treatment for GCK-diabetes. Since 1996, the number of monogenic diabetes genes has expanded from three to 60 or more, with 14 called MODY genes; however newer evidence has called some of these gene associations into question. Monogenic diabetes is currently underdiagnosed, but the decreasing cost of sequencing and the ability to create multi-gene next-generation sequencing panels may increase access to testing and a proper diagnosis. For the testing to be useful, it is important that the genes chosen for these panels have appropriate evidence as causal genes. The NIH Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) Monogenic Diabetes Gene Curation Expert Panel was convened to bring together experts in clinical and laboratory aspects of monogenic diabetes and gene curation to publish curations for the ClinGen website based on evidence from clinical and molecular studies and population databases. To date, we have published evidence-based gene curation summaries for Gene-Disease Validity for HNF1A and HNF4A (both classified as Definitive for monogenic diabetes) and are in the process of curating and publishing curations for GCK (Definitive for monogenic diabetes), INS (Definitive for monogenic diabetes and permanent neonatal diabetes), HNF1B (Definitive for renal cysts and diabetes), and KLF11 (Disputed for monogenic diabetes due to limited evidence and high population frequencies of variants previously asserted as causative). Curation of additional genes is in progress. Accurate curations will inform appropriate testing panel content to reduce ambiguous results and assure variants identified are clinically relevant for informing the care of diabetes in patients and their families. Disclosure T.I. Pollin: None. M.A. Mayers: None. S.W. Greeley: None. K.A. Maloney: None. R.N. Naylor: None. R.E. Pakyz: None. K.A. Patel: None. M. Udler: None. H. Zhang: None. K. Colclough: None. C. Thaxton: None. Funding National Institutes of Health (U24HD093486)

Mediální kurace jako praxe paměti: Situační analýza mnemonických praxí mládeže

This study focuses on the modalities of transmission of history-related knowledge to a current young generation (12–25 years old). Data from 11 focus groups with pupils and students of schools at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels were used to analyse situations of knowledge transmission with regard to four significant historical events: September 11th 2001, November 17th 1989, August 21th 1968 and February 25th 1948. The study introduces media curation as a senzitizing concept suitable for grapsing the selective dimension of mnemonic practices. The analysis is focused on aspects of expert, social, or data-based curation in situations where mnemonic content is transmitted. This analytical instrument is used in the study to account for situations in which mnemonic practices of the informants take place.

Achieving FAIR Data Principles at the Environmental Data Initiative, the US-LTER Data Repository

The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is a continuation and expansion of the original United Stated Long-Term Ecological Research Program (US-LTER) data repository which went into production in 2013. Building on decades of data management experience in LTER, EDI is addressing the challenge of publishing a diverse corpus of research data (Servilla et al. 2016). EDI’s accomplishments span all aspects of the data curation and publication lifecycle, including repository cyberinfrastructure, outreach and training, and enhancements to data documentation methodologies used by the environmental and ecological research communities. EDI is managing almost 43,000 unique data packages and their revisions from a community of nearly 2,300 individual data authors, most of which are contributed by LTER sites, and are openly accessible and documented with rich science metadata in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard. Here we will present how EDI achieves FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Stall et al. 2017), and report data use metrics as a measure of success. The FAIR principles serve as benchmarks for EDI’s operation and management: the data we curate are Findable because they reside in an open repository, with unique and persistent digital object identifiers (DOIs) and standard metadata indexed as a searchable resource; they are Accessible through industry standard protocols and are, in most cases, under an open-access license (access control is available if required); Interoperability is achieved by archiving data in commonly used file formats, and both metadata and data are machine readable and accessible; rich, high quality science metadata, with automated congruence and completeness checking, render data fit for Reuse in multiple contexts and environments, along with easily generated data provenance to document their lineage. The success of this approach is proven by the number and spatial and temporal extent of recent re-analyses and synthesis efforts of these data. Although formal data citations are not yet common practice, a Google Scholar search reveals over 400 journal articles crediting data re-use through an EDI DOI. However, despite improved data availability, researchers still report that the largest time investment in synthesis projects is discovering, cleaning and combining primary datasets until all data are completely understood and converted to a similar format. Starting with long-term biodiversity observation data EDI is addressing this issue by implementing a pre-harmonization of thematically similar data sets. Positioned between the data author’s specific data format and larger biodiversity data stores or synthesis projects, this approach allows uniform access without the loss of ancillary information. This pre-harmonization step may be accomplished by data managers because the dataset still contains all original information without any aggregation or science question specific decisions for data omission or cleaning. The data are still distributed into distinct datasets allowing for asynchronous updating of long-term observations. The addition of specific and standardized metadata makes them easily discoverable.

Setting up a National Research Data Curation Service for Qatar: Challenges and Opportunities

Over the past decade, Qatar has been making considerable progress towards developing a sustainable research culture for the nation. The main driver behind Qatar’s progress in research and innovation is Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development (QF), a private, non-profit organization that aims to utilise research as a catalyst for expanding, diversifying and improving the country’s economy, health and environment. While this has resulted in a significant growth in the number of research publications produced by Qatari researchers in recent years, a nationally co-ordinated approach is needed to address some of the emerging but increasingly important aspects of research data curation, such as management and publication of research data as important outputs, and their long-term digital preservation. Qatar National Library (QNL), launched in November 2012 under the umbrella of QF, aims to establish itself as a centre of excellence in Qatar for research data management, curation and publishing to address the research data-related needs of Qatari researchers and academics. This paper describes QNL’s approach towards establishing a national research data curation service for Qatar, highlighting the associated opportunities and key challenges.

Leveraging Experimental Details for an Improved Understanding of Host-Pathogen Interactome.

An increasing proportion of curated host-pathogen interaction (HPI) information is becoming available in interaction databases. These data represent detailed, experimentally-verified, molecular interaction data, which may be used to better understand infectious diseases. By their very nature, HPIs are context dependent, where the outcome of two proteins as interacting or not depends on the precise biological conditions studied and approaches used for identifying these interactions. The associated biology and the technical details of the experiments identifying interacting protein molecules are increasing being curated using defined curation standards but are overlooked in current HPI network modeling. Given the increase in data size and complexity, awareness of the process and variables included in HPI identification and curation, and their effect on data analysis and interpretation is crucial in understanding pathogenesis. We describe the use of HPI data for network modeling, aspects of curation that can help researchers to more accurately model specific infection conditions, and provide examples to illustrate these principles. © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Current Issues and Approaches to Curating Student Research Data

EDITOR'S SUMMARYThe 2015 RDAP Summit hosted a panel discussion to address issues and challenges of curating students’ research data and digital scholarship, bringing together librarians dealing with various aspects of digital curation and management. Few institutions have a policy on handling student research data, theses and dissertations. Obstacles include insufficient know‐how, time, incentive and resources. Without guidance, data files vary widely in format and quality. Yet, as one panelist pointed out, without definitive standards, data librarians must contend with a messy reality and should be reasonable in their expectations for students. Planning for improvements must start by engaging students and advisors throughout the process of data creation. Panelists agreed on the need to further explore topics such as intellectual property, ownership and security, data quality, staff skill building and outreach to stakeholders.

Moving the mountain: analysis of the effort required to transform comparative anatomy into computable anatomy.

The diverse phenotypes of living organisms have been described for centuries, and though they may be digitized, they are not readily available in a computable form. Using over 100 morphological studies, the Phenoscape project has demonstrated that by annotating characters with community ontology terms, links between novel species anatomy and the genes that may underlie them can be made. But given the enormity of the legacy literature, how can this largely unexploited wealth of descriptive data be rendered amenable to large-scale computation? To identify the bottlenecks, we quantified the time involved in the major aspects of phenotype curation as we annotated characters from the vertebrate phylogenetic systematics literature. This involves attaching fully computable logical expressions consisting of ontology terms to the descriptions in character-by-taxon matrices. The workflow consists of: (i) data preparation, (ii) phenotype annotation, (iii) ontology development and (iv) curation team discussions and software development feedback. Our results showed that the completion of this work required two person-years by a team of two post-docs, a lead data curator, and students. Manual data preparation required close to 13% of the effort. This part in particular could be reduced substantially with better community data practices, such as depositing fully populated matrices in public repositories. Phenotype annotation required ∼40% of the effort. We are working to make this more efficient with Natural Language Processing tools. Ontology development (40%), however, remains a highly manual task requiring domain (anatomical) expertise and use of specialized software. The large overhead required for data preparation and ontology development contributed to a low annotation rate of approximately two characters per hour, compared with 14 characters per hour when activity was restricted to character annotation. Unlocking the potential of the vast stores of morphological descriptions requires better tools for efficiently processing natural language, and better community practices towards a born-digital morphology.Database URL: http://kb.phenoscape.org

Best practices for genetic resources associated with natural history collections: Recommendations for practical implementation

Researchers associated with natural history museums have made the collection of genetic resources a priority due to their importance in molecular studies, but often the long-term curation of these collections is difficult due to decentralized curation over multiple storage locations and lack of community best practice guidelines for their stewardship. Unlike traditional natural history specimens, the research utility of genetic samples increases with lower storage temperatures and fewer freeze–thaw events and, in addition, their use is consumptive. Collection managers must, therefore, maximize the research potential of each sample by carefully considering use on a case-by-case basis. This paper presents standardized guidelines accumulated for the management of genetic collections associated with natural history collections. These recommended practices are informed by general standards for biorepositories and augmented by information unique to natural history collections with the goal of providing a foundation for those curating genetic samples. Information pertains to all aspects of genetic sample curation and will assist those in making decisions regarding how to collect, store, track, process, and distribute genetic specimen samples. These guidelines also will allow users to make informed decisions regarding how to apply and improve the curation of their collection given their institution's goals and available resources.

Best practices for genetic resources associated with natural history collections: Recommendations for practical implementation

Abstract Researchers associated with natural history museums have made the collection of genetic resources a priority due to their importance in molecular studies, but often the long-term curation of these collections is difficult due to decentralized curation over multiple storage locations and lack of community best practice guidelines for their stewardship. Unlike traditional natural history specimens, the research utility of genetic samples increases with lower storage temperatures and fewer freeze–thaw events and, in addition, their use is consumptive. Collection managers must, therefore, maximize the research potential of each sample by carefully considering use on a case-by-case basis. This paper presents standardized guidelines accumulated for the management of genetic collections associated with natural history collections. These recommended practices are informed by general standards for biorepositories and augmented by information unique to natural history collections with the goal of providing a foundation for those curating genetic samples. Information pertains to all aspects of genetic sample curation and will assist those in making decisions regarding how to collect, store, track, process, and distribute genetic specimen samples. These guidelines also will allow users to make informed decisions regarding how to apply and improve the curation of their collection given their institution's goals and available resources.

From biographical lexicon to scholarly edition: the question of sustainability of digital editions

ABSTRACTThe paper deals with the issues of digital curation, including storage formats, presentation, and access rights, in the frame of the case-study of two projects on digitisation of written materials: the Scholarly digital editions of Slovenian literature and the Slovenian biographical lexicon. Three basic aspects of digital curation, including preservation, are discussed. The first aspect is the sustainability of our digital format, i.e. of our textencoding; where the international standards and best practices are used, particularly the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange as a self-documenting, transparent and widely adopted de-facto standard. The second aspect is the presentation and search over the materials, where the static HTML pages and the Fedora Commons repository with SoLR full-text search are used. The last aspect deals with the access rights to the materials: in what format and for whom, and under what conditions are the texts made available. The argument on maximum openness as is embodied in the Creative Commons a licence was adopted as most applicative solution for the presented digital editions.

Collaborative biocuration--text-mining development task for document prioritization for curation

The Critical Assessment of Information Extraction systems in Biology (BioCreAtIvE) challenge evaluation is a community-wide effort for evaluating text mining and information extraction systems for the biological domain. The ‘BioCreative Workshop 2012’ subcommittee identified three areas, or tracks, that comprised independent, but complementary aspects of data curation in which they sought community input: literature triage (Track I); curation workflow (Track II) and text mining/natural language processing (NLP) systems (Track III). Track I participants were invited to develop tools or systems that would effectively triage and prioritize articles for curation and present results in a prototype web interface. Training and test datasets were derived from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD; http://ctdbase.org) and consisted of manuscripts from which chemical–gene–disease data were manually curated. A total of seven groups participated in Track I. For the triage component, the effectiveness of participant systems was measured by aggregate gene, disease and chemical ‘named-entity recognition’ (NER) across articles; the effectiveness of ‘information retrieval’ (IR) was also measured based on ‘mean average precision’ (MAP). Top recall scores for gene, disease and chemical NER were 49, 65 and 82%, respectively; the top MAP score was 80%. Each participating group also developed a prototype web interface; these interfaces were evaluated based on functionality and ease-of-use by CTD’s biocuration project manager. In this article, we present a detailed description of the challenge and a summary of the results.

Biocuration workflows and text mining: overview of the BioCreative 2012 Workshop Track II

Manual curation of data from the biomedical literature is a rate-limiting factor for many expert curated databases. Despite the continuing advances in biomedical text mining and the pressing needs of biocurators for better tools, few existing text-mining tools have been successfully integrated into production literature curation systems such as those used by the expert curated databases. To close this gap and better understand all aspects of literature curation, we invited submissions of written descriptions of curation workflows from expert curated databases for the BioCreative 2012 Workshop Track II. We received seven qualified contributions, primarily from model organism databases. Based on these descriptions, we identified commonalities and differences across the workflows, the common ontologies and controlled vocabularies used and the current and desired uses of text mining for biocuration. Compared to a survey done in 2009, our 2012 results show that many more databases are now using text mining in parts of their curation workflows. In addition, the workshop participants identified text-mining aids for finding gene names and symbols (gene indexing), prioritization of documents for curation (document triage) and ontology concept assignment as those most desired by the biocurators.Database URL: http://www.biocreative.org/tasks/bc-workshop-2012/workflow/

A Collaborative Framework for Data Management Services: The Experience of the University of California

The National Science Foundation and other funding agencies now require researchers to include data management plans with new grant proposals. Faced with this requirement, researchers are looking to libraries for help with various aspects of research data management and curation, from creating data management plans to archiving and providing access to their research data. The University of California Libraries deliver a growing range of services and tools such as the<a href="https://dmp.cdlib.org/"> DMPTool</a>,<a href="http://n2t.net/ezid/"> EZID</a>,<a href="http://merritt.cdlib.org/"> Merritt</a>, <a href="http://webarchives.cdlib.org/">Web Archiving Service</a> and campus-based data management programs. This article discusses these initiatives, tools, and methods for campus engagement and faculty outreach, plus opportunities and challenges in developing library data services.

Tracking and coordinating an international curation effort for the CCDS Project

The Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) collaboration involves curators at multiple centers with a goal of producing a conservative set of high quality, protein-coding region annotations for the human and mouse reference genome assemblies. The CCDS data set reflects a ‘gold standard’ definition of best supported protein annotations, and corresponding genes, which pass a standard series of quality assurance checks and are supported by manual curation. This data set supports use of genome annotation information by human and mouse researchers for effective experimental design, analysis and interpretation. The CCDS project consists of analysis of automated whole-genome annotation builds to identify identical CDS annotations, quality assurance testing and manual curation support. Identical CDS annotations are tracked with a CCDS identifier (ID) and any future change to the annotated CDS structure must be agreed upon by the collaborating members. CCDS curation guidelines were developed to address some aspects of curation in order to improve initial annotation consistency and to reduce time spent in discussing proposed annotation updates. Here, we present the current status of the CCDS database and details on our procedures to track and coordinate our efforts. We also present the relevant background and reasoning behind the curation standards that we have developed for CCDS database treatment of transcripts that are nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) candidates, for transcripts containing upstream open reading frames, for identifying the most likely translation start codons and for the annotation of readthrough transcripts. Examples are provided to illustrate the application of these guidelines.Database URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CCDS/CcdsBrowse.cgi

Using Textpresso for Information Retrieval, Fact Extraction

Ten years ago WormBase^1^ started as a repository for sequence data for the modelorganism Caenorhabditis elegans and has since striven to include the curation of allgenetic and molecular data published for this nematode. With a publication rate in the C.elegans field of approximately 800 papers per year, WormBase (WB) has the opportunity to include information from every paper published. Currently there are ~11,000 full text research papers (mid-1970's to the present) downloaded into the WB curation database, from which over 27 data types (i.e. genetic interactions, transgene objects, gene expression patterns, mutant phenotypes etc.) are extracted by curators. Textpresso^2^ is an open source text-mining tool capable of rapid searches for keywords, as well as concepts, from the full text of research papers. Curators at WB use Textpresso on a daily basis for many aspects of literature curation, from simple keyword searches to semi- or fully automated entity and fact extraction, which feed into curation pipelines or directly into the curation database itself. In addition, Textpresso greatly aids prioritization of literature curation by retrieving papers based on their full contents rather than solely on their abstracts. Such retrievable contents can range from the very particular (such as a gene simply being mentioned in the Materials and Methods section of a paper) to the complex (such as molecular functions that involve cellular components). As WB expands to incorporate the genomes of other nematodes, we will be working with Textpresso developers to set up a library of literature for related nematodes. We expect Textpresso to be crucial for most efficiently directing our efforts in literature curation, and for most quickly providing data to users searching the literature. In this workshop we will show how we use Textpresso in our curation pipeline to help with literature queries, to prioritize our workflow, and to automate data and fact extraction.1 "WormBase":http://www.wormbase.org2 "Textpresso":http://www.textpresso.org

Using Textpresso for Information Retrieval, Fact Extraction

AbstractTen years ago WormBase^1^ started as a repository for sequence data for the modelorganism Caenorhabditis elegans and has since striven to include the curation of allgenetic and molecular data published for this nematode. With a publication rate in the C.elegans field of approximately 800 papers per year, WormBase (WB) has the opportunity to include information from every paper published. Currently there are ~11,000 full text research papers (mid-1970's to the present) downloaded into the WB curation database, from which over 27 data types (i.e. genetic interactions, transgene objects, gene expression patterns, mutant phenotypes etc.) are extracted by curators. Textpresso^2^ is an open source text-mining tool capable of rapid searches for keywords, as well as concepts, from the full text of research papers. Curators at WB use Textpresso on a daily basis for many aspects of literature curation, from simple keyword searches to semi- or fully automated entity and fact extraction, which feed into curation pipelines or directly into the curation database itself. In addition, Textpresso greatly aids prioritization of literature curation by retrieving papers based on their full contents rather than solely on their abstracts. Such retrievable contents can range from the very particular (such as a gene simply being mentioned in the Materials and Methods section of a paper) to the complex (such as molecular functions that involve cellular components). As WB expands to incorporate the genomes of other nematodes, we will be working with Textpresso developers to set up a library of literature for related nematodes. We expect Textpresso to be crucial for most efficiently directing our efforts in literature curation, and for most quickly providing data to users searching the literature. In this workshop we will show how we use Textpresso in our curation pipeline to help with literature queries, to prioritize our workflow, and to automate data and fact extraction.1 "WormBase":http://www.wormbase.org2 "Textpresso":http://www.textpresso.org

Digital curation

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to provide an overview of development and recent focus on digital curation and ties it to larger cyberinfrastructure initiatives.Design/methodology/approachProvides a useful viewpoint on the development and recent focus on digital curation.FindingsDigital curation is the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use. While there have been people doing different aspects of data curation and digital preservation for decades, recent events have brought a number of ideas, organizations, and individuals together to focus more intently on digital curation. Reports in the US by the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and in the UK by Dr Liz Lyon of UKOLN have pointed out the aspects of digital curation which need to be in place to ensure that digital objects can be maintained, preserved, and remain available for future use. These reports along with increased research focus at conferences and the emergence of new educational programs have led to the emergence of digital curation and made digital curators a new entry into the information professions. Increasingly, digital curation is becoming an umbrella concept that includes digital preservation, data curation, electronic records management, and digital asset management.Practical implicationsThis article discusses and defines digital curation and notes how this theme has permeated in recent reports, conferences, and educational offerings.Originality/valueThe article synthesizes current digital curation efforts and helps to define this new concept for information professionals.

Protocols for scientists on the deposition of investigated mineral specimens

The mineral specimens that form the basis of scientific investigations should be retained in permanent repositories for future investigators. Just as it is important, as part of the scientific methodology, for a responsible investigator to provide information on the conditions of experiments so that the results may be repeated and corroborated or challenged, it is equally as important that the very specimens used in such investigations be retained in major museums. These specimens are the only mineralogic evidence for the investigations. Although many mineralogists retain studied samples for some time, the duration of this retention period is affected by temporary degrees of interest, and many other factors, mortality among them. I-arge, research-oriented museums maintain systematic, well-curated collections in which such material is preserved. It is thus available for both contemporary and future investigators. Mineralogists are encouraged, in all instances, to deposit all studied samples in these repositories. Unfortunately, this approach has been followed only infrequently, and the vast preponderance ofinvestigated mineral specimens has either been lost, or the necessary linkage between these specimens and the published studies of them has been lost because the studied material was not deposited. Careful institutional curation can preclude the loss of information and specimens and should be utilized by the responsible investigator as a normal adjunct to the completion of such studies, much in the t U.S.A. member, Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names. IMA. way publication functions as a final repository for the data. The preservation of investigated specimen material is, therefore, a critical responsibility of professional mineralogic practice. Even unpublished data can best be preserved in museums so that it too, with the specimens, may be eventually shared with others. The original investigator is the person best qualified to document which specimens were actually used; this is of critical significance in the case of type specimens (Dunn and Mandarino, 1987). The use of specimen numbers, carefully cited in the published research, remains the best method of correlating specimens and data. Deposits should be made in a direct manner, not third-hand, so that the integrity of the material is not compromised. Supporting correspondence is useful in the archival aspects of curation and is therefore encouraged. The cooperation of all mineralogists is necessary in this longterm effort to serve the science; those who have used such research collections know well their potential and value. Please help to enhance and sustain them by depositing investigated specimens in large, well-established institutional mineral collections. The preceding statement was approved by both the Commission on Museums and the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names of the International Mineralogical Association. RnrnnnNcr cnno

Protocols for scientists on the deposition of investigated mineral specimens

The mineral specimens that form the basis of scientific investigations should be retained in permanent repositories for future investigators. Just as it is important, as part of the scientific methodology, for a responsible investigator to provide information on the conditions of experiments so that the results may be repeated and corroborated or challenged, it is equally as important that the very specimens used in such investigations be retained in major museums. These specimens are the only mineralogic evidence for the investigations. Although many mineralogists retain studied samples for some time, the duration of this retention period is affected by temporary degrees of interest, and many other factors, mortality among them. I-arge, research-oriented museums maintain systematic, well-curated collections in which such material is preserved. It is thus available for both contemporary and future investigators. Mineralogists are encouraged, in all instances, to deposit all studied samples in these repositories. Unfortunately, this approach has been followed only infrequently, and the vast preponderance ofinvestigated mineral specimens has either been lost, or the necessary linkage between these specimens and the published studies of them has been lost because the studied material was not deposited. Careful institutional curation can preclude the loss of information and specimens and should be utilized by the responsible investigator as a normal adjunct to the completion of such studies, much in the t U.S.A. member, Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names. IMA. way publication functions as a final repository for the data. The preservation of investigated specimen material is, therefore, a critical responsibility of professional mineralogic practice. Even unpublished data can best be preserved in museums so that it too, with the specimens, may be eventually shared with others. The original investigator is the person best qualified to document which specimens were actually used; this is of critical significance in the case of type specimens (Dunn and Mandarino, 1987). The use of specimen numbers, carefully cited in the published research, remains the best method of correlating specimens and data. Deposits should be made in a direct manner, not third-hand, so that the integrity of the material is not compromised. Supporting correspondence is useful in the archival aspects of curation and is therefore encouraged. The cooperation of all mineralogists is necessary in this longterm effort to serve the science; those who have used such research collections know well their potential and value. Please help to enhance and sustain them by depositing investigated specimens in large, well-established institutional mineral collections. The preceding statement was approved by both the Commission on Museums and the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names of the International Mineralogical Association. RnrnnnNcr cnno