3 hours. 3 hours lecture and 3 hours lab per week.
Natural History Collections Management
Course Description
Theories, policies, and operational procedures in the management of natural history collections, including higher category classification, identification, field collecting, accessioning, preparation, curation, and data management.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will do a term project to develop and curate a
collection, demonstrating this plan with a test collection and
summarizing the results in a written report. The results will also be presented to the class in an oral format. Thus, graduate students will demonstrate the ability to independently curate an actual natural history collection.
Athena Title
Natural Hist Collections Mgmt
Prerequisite
Permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will learn operational procedures involved in natural history collection management.
Students will learn the importance of natural history collections, and will learn the diversity of research, service, and teaching that can be done via collections.
Students will learn some of the theories, policies, and operational procedures involved in the management of collections.
Students will practice identification, field collecting, accessioning, preparation, curation, and data management skills as well as prepare study specimens.
Students will demonstrate a responsible attitude toward museum work and practice the accuracy needed in
collection management. Mastery of the material will be demonstrated on tests administered during the semester.
By completing Unit 1 of this course, students will describe the types of scientific research or teaching that use biological museum collections.
By discussion of ethical and legal considerations, students will be able to define the types of regulations and other concerns that limit the collection or movement of specimens for preservation or research.
Through exploration of the biological collections associated with our museum, students will assess the best methods to create their own museum contributions.
By learning about genomic and other methods used in analysis of museum specimens, students will devise novel studies of available collection materials.
By the end of this course, students will compose a useful explanation of biological collections that reach the appropriate audience.
Topical Outline
1. Role and function of NHMs for biological collections
a. Where and under what conditions IS everything? What kind of research does that support? Bigfoot/bear, GBIP, iNat, important data streams, somebody saw a thing, how do we know, what do we document
b. Relationship to other institutions, agency scientists, zoos/bot gardens, research, teaching
2. Ethical and legal considerations
a. Permitting, how many, under what conditions, contribution of “collecting” to T&E, poachers
b. Nagoya, IUCN, red list
c. Anesthesia/humane taking
3. Safety concerns, understanding chemical safety RTK
a. Methods to distinguish “unknowns” a big part of dealing with older collections (recent lit on this, salting out isopropanol, etc.)
b. Ups/downs of different chemicals for later processes (stable isotopes, genomics, measurements, color)
4. Collections – each one we explore typical means of preservation, data/metadata management, types of information critical for future use, photography, measurements, SHARING SPECIMENS, destructive/non-destructive sampling, how these are classified and typically organized
a. Herbarium
b. Corals
c. Fish
d. Birds (specimen prep e.g., skins, skulls)
e. Mammals (whales)
f. Herps
g. Invertebrates
h. Fungi
i. Relationships – what if multiple types in a preserved specimen? Of what value?
5. Museomics – ancient/historic DNA, validation of ID, methods, common outcomes e.g., diversity/divergence
a. Basic popgen, sequencing insight – the value of genomes
b. Gut samples, parasite load
c. Genomic databases
6. Teaching, outreach, display with specimens (more ups/downs, e.g., fish in jars versus taxidermy versus shells)
a. Telling the story, appropriate level of writing
b. Representing the history and provenance of data
c. Career opportunities
