Prerogative of Harlots

One for the Laydeez

2011-12-17T15:21:00.002-05:00

For all of you out there that love Ryan Gosling, I am delighted to present the blogging genius that is "Hey girl. I love museums." (with thanks to Derya for sharing)

Translator

2011-12-15T13:20:00.002-05:00

As a Brit working in America, I realize that my colleagues are often confused by the apparent contradictions between what I say and what I think/do. So here is a helpful translator.

Extinction

2011-12-15T10:44:00.000-05:00

The December edition of Museums Journal contains a depressing article by Gareth Harris on the slow demise of the specialist natural history curator in UK museums. It accompanies an even more depressing letter from Steven Falk, who was recently made redundant from his position as senior keeper of natural history at the Warwickshire Museum. Falk was, in his own words, the "last surviving keeper of natural history in the West Midlands," a region with a population of over 5 million people. When he started work (in 1990) there were 10 specialist natural history positions in West Midlands museums. Now there are none.

As has been discussed in previous posts, the UK is ploughing the depths of public austerity measures at the moment. Anyone who reads this blog knows what I think about that, so we won't rehash it here. But one result of shrinking budgets is that managers are keen to look for efficiencies in their operations. This is the stock response of various local authority managers that Harris quotes in his article. There's much talk of "integrated approaches," "restructuring," and "realignment of resources."

I have a certain sympathy with this logic. I don't particularly see myself as a paleontologist, a zoologist, or a natural historian. I'm a manager - of people and resources, both financial and fossil (the resources that is - not the people....). But I do have one significant advantage over a non-specialist, which is that having trained and done research in systematic zoology and paleontology, I understand the needs of our users and I can prioritize effectively based on this. I can also interpret the material in my care for a wider audience. And both of these skills, I'd argue, are critical components of responsible collections stewardship.

Could I transfer my skill set to a non-natural history museum? Probably, if I were solely concerned with administration. But I would still be heavily dependent on specialists to guide the decisions that affected their collections. The fact is that natural history collections are different from those covering the arts and humanities. I'm currently working with colleagues from Yale's libraries and art museums on metadata standards for cross-campus collections discovery, and its already very clear that we place different values on different categories of data.

To expand on this, it's frequently said (but worth repeating) that a large part of the value of natural history collections lies in their associated data, something that may be hard to grasp if you look after Rembrandts for a living. So an effective strategy for managing natural history collections might be tilted more towards data management and delivery than, say, object treatment. Or at least, it ought to be. And the quality of those data will be heavily dependent on specialist expertise. There is no amount of experience as a conservator or historian that will equip you to identify insects.

Part of the problem, as anyone who has ever attended an AAM meeting will know, is that natural history forms only a tiny part of the the museum sector. There are far more art museums and many, many more history museums. This is reflected in the output of graduates from museum studies programs. So in simple statistical terms, if local authority managers don't actively defend the need for at least some science expertise on their museum staff, you will end up with "social historians and archaeologists" (in Falk's words) dealing with natural history collections. There are just more of them around.

That managerial decision will be easier if the skill sets of those natural history curators encompass some general management experience, and even easier if the person making the decision was once a natural history curator themselves. I still know too many colleagues who turn their noses up at "administration" or "management-speak" and want to be "left alone to get on with my job." Unfortunately, in a shrinking workforce, flexibility is key. The cost of keeping your job may be doing less of what drew you into the profession in the first place.

Stuffed

2011-11-11T15:33:00.000-05:00

Now don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of taxidermy. I wouldn't be working in a natural history museum if I wasn't. But there's something about this Martha Stewart piece that's deeply creepy. Maybe it's Martha herself. But just for the record, folks, don't use antique taxidermy as a table centerpiece, unless you want to be chowing down on arsenic trioxide and all the other nasties that were used to prepare it.

Big Money

2011-11-11T08:51:00.000-05:00

In hot-off-the-press investment news, Bloomberg reports that Standard & Poor’s Global Luxury Index is failing to reflect the escalating demand for dinosaurs. According to Hal Prandi of Two Guys Fossils Inc what the market is waiting for is dinosaur genitalia. "There’s never been a fossilized penis or vagina found on a dinosaur,” he says. “The first person who finds one is going to make bundles of cash, but who knows how much.” I think I'll stop there.

Good News

2011-11-10T11:13:00.000-05:00

The good news, according to AAM, is that the Senate Appropriations Committee for the Interior, which funds NEA, NEH and historic preservation programs, has unveiled a funding bill for FY12 that restores $8 million for Save America’s Treasures, which has not received funding since FY10. The bad news is that the bill, which also proposes $155 million each for NEA and NEH, will likely face numerous amendments during Committee consideration. As the happy recipient of an SAT grant I can testify to the importance of this program and would urge American readers to write to their Member of Congress to support restoration of the scheme.

Trust

2011-11-10T10:49:00.010-05:00

A few days ago, I was hanging around in the great hall of London's Natural History Museum, considering their cast of Dipolodocus carnegii, which is the focus a new fundraising effort to renovate the hall. It's called "I Love Dippy," because apparently that's what generations of visitors to the Museum have affectionately called the skeleton. I've been going there for at least 40 years, and it's the first time I've ever heard it called that, which leads me to believe that the sobriquet was dreamt up by the NHM marketing department, but maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon. However, to its credit, the captioning associated with the appeal made it very clear that "Dippy" (ugh) is not actually a "real" skeleton, but a cast donated by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

Despite the fact that Carnegie's name is on the specimen, I doubt that most visitors to NHM know anything at all about him, despite the fact that he was a major philanthropist, who gave away around $380 million of his personal fortune (which would probably be worth around $5 billion today) and has his name on, among other things, two museums, a university, a medal for children's books, two towns, a street in Belgrade, and a species of cactus. Being a donor is a thankless task.

I had Carnegie in mind after my return to the States, when there was an announcement on Facebook that the Occupy Wall Street movement was about to invade the dinosaur galleries of AMNH. Many gallons of editorial ink have been devoted to discussing the aims of OWS, and frankly I'm still none the wiser. They seem to have a lot in common with the Tea Party (although both movements vehemently deny this) in that they are expressions of volcanic anger directed at everything to do with "The Man." Personally, I think that both the Tea Party and OWS are actually manifestations of the same "Man," who is pulling the strings behind the scenes, but then I'm paranoid and enjoy conspiracy theories. There have been rumbles for a few weeks that OWS was considering targetting New York museums, on the basis that they are "elitist." If that's not evidence of an OWS/Tea Party link, I don't know what is. Teabaggers are notorious for their suspicion/hatred of "elites." The AMNH, which is (at least superficially) the least elitist of the big Manhattan museums, probably thought it was safe. But no.

However, before we get into the whys and wherefores of this, I am pleased to offer you an eyewitness account of the great protest (see above for a picture):

There was only about 12 of them, wearing little dino noses, and they just stood around talking.... At the end they walked over to the ceratopsians and one of them did a bit of a mystical dance. They were a bit late getting there, and I was wondering if they'd been held up by visitor services asking them if they wanted tickets to the IMAX. There were about 25-30 AMNH staff watching and even more Security.

So hardly the storming of the Bastille. But why does OWS have such a downer on dinosaurs? The answer lies in a donation made to the Museum some years ago by David H. Koch. The name may not be familiar, but Koch is the 4th richest man in America (according Forbes Magazine) and a lightning rod for OWS, which sees him (and his brother Charles) as bankrolling the libertarian right, attacking the Obama administration, and generally asserting undue influence on the political process by virtue of their personal wealth. The Kochs have been the targets of much bigger (and more violent) protests than the one at AMNH, but the fact that the dinosaurs live in the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing (named in recognition of Koch's $20 million gift the the Museum) apparently made them a legitimate focus for a discussion of the "evils of Koch" as my source described the protestors' rantings.

All of this made me think again about Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie, Koch is a heavyweight philanthropist; his foundation has donated or pledged over $750 million to medical research, science, education, and the arts. Like Carnegie, who devoted much of his wealth to promoting anti-imperialism and world peace, there is much to admire in Koch's views, which have encompassed support for gay marriage and stem cell research, opposition to the Iraq War, and (back in the eighties) decriminalization of recreational drugs. And unlike Carnegie, whose company unleashed the Pinkertons on striking steelworkers, leading to a riot in which ten people died and hundreds were injured, Koch's support of the free market doesn't extend to physical force. When we look at the dinosaurs in the Carnegie Museum, we don't think of the spilled blood of the workers at Homestead. So should we care about the Koch Dinosaur Hall?

Actually, I think we should, and here's why. Unlike Carnegie, whose interest in science didn't really extend beyond a general support of evolution, David Koch has a very definite agenda related to climate change. He has expressed skepticism about anthropogenic global warming; according to a recent article in the New Yorker, the Kochs have donated funding to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, "underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups." The New Yorker article also cited a UMASS Amherst report that identified Koch Industries as one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. The content of the article has not gone unchallenged by Koch Industries and others (see here for a counterview), but in a sense the specific rights and wrongs are not important. It's the mere existence of controversy that's a problem.

Museums like AMNH are in a unique position to address questions of climate change, and to bring the results of this work to the attention of the public. Indeed, AMNH has already produced an exhibit on the subject, online educational material like this kids' activity, and taught courses. So it can hardly be accused of soft-peddling the issue. But in the current, toxic political environment, any association can - and probably will - be placed under intense scrutiny. Was a particular statement slanted a particular way to avoid giving offense? Or was it over-emphasized to avoid a perception of bias? And suddenly, an issue has been created where none actually existed. This has already happened at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, where the human origins exhibit (also named for Koch, in recognition of a $15 million gift) was criticized for downplaying the significance of - you guessed it - human-caused global warming.

All of which goes to demonstrate the extraordinarily narrow and twisting path that museums are forced to tread. On the one hand, as public funding is slashed, they become more and more dependent on the generosity of donors like David Koch to support their research and education programs. At the same time, they have to be protective of their most precious resource, which is public trust. A 2008 survey by IMLS showed that libraries and museums rank higher in trustworthiness than all other information sources including government, commercial, and private Web sites. Trust is more fragile than any artifact in our collections, and once lost is very difficult to get back.

I Read The News Today...

2011-10-17T15:03:00.001-04:00

My colleague Jackie Hoff, from the Science Museum of Minnesota, has provided quite a nice description of a typical "day in the life" of someone working with natural history collections. If anything, it's a bit normal - for one thing, there seems to be a complete absence of crazy people. I guess maybe folks are more level-headed in the Midwest. But the paleontologist who can't remember where he wants his specimen to be loaned to? That's totally true to life.

Suckers

2011-10-17T14:36:00.000-04:00

It's not often you see the word "possibly" in a banner headline, which suggests that even the authors of this Yahoo! News item found it a bit far-fetched. There are many reasons why you might find an assemblages of icthyosaur bones, but I'd have to say that "lair of an as-yet-undiscovered giant cephalopod" would be low on my list. Plainly I need to get to the GSA meetings more often. BTW, have you noticed how all giant undescribed marine creatures are "nearly 100 feet long?" Funny that.

Undoubtably this news item will turn up on cryptozoological websites, where it will be linked to misinterpreted whale blubber wash-ups as yet more evidence of "giant octopi."

List of the Month

2011-09-15T07:03:00.002-04:00

This one gets my vote.

Million Dollar Shed

2011-09-14T13:33:00.005-04:00

It's refreshing to see that the USA is not the only place where people chunter about public spending for museums. In the UK, a minor storm in a teacup is erupting over the fate of Roald Dahl's shed. The Dahl museum wants to move and conserve the shed, a 1950s "temporary" structure in which Dahl wrote most of his classic stories and which has been left untouched since he died in 1990. This comes with a £500K price-tag, which strikes some people, notably Andrew M. Brown of the Daily Telegraph, as a bit steep.

In part, this comes down to the usual problem of people not understanding what's involved in conservation; if you look closely at the film of the hut on the BBC's website, it becomes immediately apparent that many hours of work will be required to stabilise the hut and its contents; it's packed full of archival materials, including papers, photographs, furniture, and other items, all of which will need treatment and most of which appear, even from a distance, to be severely degraded. Conservation is expensive. Get over it.

A bigger issue from Brown et al, is the fact that Dahl's family are asking for help rather funding the project themselves. Dahl's books remain best-sellers world-wide, no-doubt ensuring a dependable revenue stream for his Estate. According to the Museum the family has made "a very significant financial contribution" to the project. It may seem a little intrusive to them, but if they want the public to pony up funds they may have to come clean about exactly how much that contribution is. That's the world we live in

Million Dollar Attic

2011-09-14T10:21:00.001-04:00

I might as well confess right now that I don't listen to National Public Radio, because I have to spend all day listening to other people's opinions and the idea that I might spend my leisure time doing the same thing is, frankly, a real downer. Nonetheless, I *did* listen to this piece from Morning Edition, because it featured my former colleagues Mark Norell and Carl Mehling, and because it included the remarkable claim that Carl actually goes to lectures at SVP before he starts partying (only kidding, Carl!).

However, I came away irritated because, as is usually the case when journalists come to the museum, they kick off with an assenine comment about how museum collections are like "my grandparent's attic, only more exotic." Hahahaha. Well guess what, guys? I'm currently spending about half a million of your taxpayer dollars on my olde curiosity shoppe, so you'd better hope that it's a bit more useful than the contents of grandad's attic.

And, of course, it is. If you want to how we could possibly justify spending all that money on a bunch of dusty old bits of this-n-that, take a look here. For now, I hope Morning Edition sticks to talking about more appropriate, light-hearted topics. Suggestively-shaped vegetables seems more up their street.

Big Ideas

2011-09-13T16:07:00.000-04:00

Museums should be places where we celebrate the human experience, rather than dwelling on all the nasty stuff. This is the gist of an op-ed piece by Tiffany Jenkins in The Independent. I'll let you mull over her thesis yourself. It does raise an interesting point, I guess, about why museums preserve stuff; if the sole purpose of the collection is to memorialize, is it really a museum? It also raises questions of balance - how can the moral certainty required for a memorial co-exist with a balanced, dispassionate consideration of history? But I ended up being much more interested by the author's home institution. Dr. Jenkins works for the Institute of Ideas, which is not to be confused with the Ideas Institute. Puts me in mind of the People's Front for Judea and the Judean People's Front. The Ideas Institute shows what happens when Marxists go Libertarian, and the results are predictably hilarious. I had a great deal of fun reading their 21 Pledges for Political Progress - for example #20 says "direct state funding of health to biomedical research into cures, the latest drugs and equipment, rather than punitive campaigns to change individual behaviour, in the interests of public health and good cheer." In the light of my previous post, this is something that I would be all in favor of.

Weighty Matters

2011-09-13T14:40:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago a colleague sent me a post from the Center for the Future of Museums blog about a new exhibit that is being planned for the Peabody. It's called "Big Food" and its about the "global obesity epidemic." She wanted me to (1) give the blog post a plug and (2) make it go "viral." This is me doing #1. For #2, I showed her that honey badger clip from YouTube and asked whether she really thought the blog post had the same potential. It's a good post, but frankly I can't see it on a teeshirt. She asked me, rather sniffily, how I would have blogged about this exhibit. And here's what I told her.

I am, not to put to fine a point on it, fat. Not hugely, break the furniture, fat, but I am carrying a few too many pounds. My doctor continually gives me grief about this, along with my cholesterol levels, blood pressure, triglyceride levels, and a bunch of other stuff. She makes me get on a scale and afterwards she plots my weight and height on a BMI chart and tells me I'm overweight, which I already know. I exercise and diet, and it doesn't do a whole lot of good. I once lost over 30lbs, then put it all back on. All of this makes me feel bad. So why would I spend my leisure time going to a museum exhibit that, frankly, sounds like a big fat downer?

This is a challenge for any museum. Consider the statistics. Around 33% of adult Americans are overweight or obese. In some communities, the figures are as high as 45-55%. These communities are often those that, traditionally, have been underserved by museums. We want them to come and visit, but are they really going to be drawn to an exhibit if it lays out, in loving detail, the medical consequences of their "lifestyle choices?" If I go to the exhibit, will skinny visitors point me out to their children as living proof of the effects of too much high fructose corn syrup? Will I become, in a very Nina Simon sort of way, part of the exhibit?

The "Obesity Epidemic" is actually a good fit for a natural history museum - it has both biological and cultural aspects and the Peabody's success in reaching out to diverse audiences means that there is the potential to make a genuine impact in the community. Partnering with the Rudd Center means that there is a good chance that the exhibit will manage to navigate the complex issues associated with obesity - unsurprisingly, effecting major changes in public health is not as easy as banning fast food and making people eat up their greens. I just wonder whether the people that we most need to talk to are the ones who will be least inclined to visit. It will be fascinating to see how the team creating the exhibition addresses this challenge.

Or maybe they could just do something on fat dinosaurs. People love dinosaurs. Even chubby ones.

Excuses, excuses

2011-09-13T14:21:00.000-04:00

I must apologize for the relative scarcity of posts over the past couple of weeks. First, I went on vacation. Then, when I returned, I found a tree had fallen on my house, courtesy of Hurricane Irene. I realize that this sounds like the blogging equivalent of "the dog ate my homework" but it's true, as the accompanying image shows. Anyway, cleaning up has absorbed a lot of my time and I haven't been thinking much about museums while I've been doing it. Which is bad, because I work in a museum. Anyway, normal service is now resumed.

When Dodos Cry

2011-08-27T00:23:00.000-04:00

The astute reader of this blog may have noticed that I rarely, if ever, get drawn into blogging about creationism, intelligent design, etc. I did do it once, I think, but that was a long time ago and I regretted it immediately. Maybe it's that, being British, I find it hard to believe that anyone actually cares about this stuff. I mean, didya happen to notice that the global economy is collapsing at the moment? But I do agree with Richard Dawkins (whoa, never thought I'd write that in a blog post!) who recently proposed that acceptance of the theory of evolution is one possible litmus test for the suitability of presidential candidates. If you fail to be convinced by the evidence for natural selection, chances are that you're going to struggle to make sense of complex economic, national security, and societal decisions as well. He then undermined my cozy state of mutual agreement by going off on a rant about why we don't use the same process to select a president as we would to, say, make a new CEO or faculty appointment. My guess is that he's a bit offended that a stupid person's vote is worth the same as his. It is worth remembering, of course, that this principal is one that people are fighting and dying for across the world even as I write. Democracy is no respector of IQ.

The Dawkins article was one of a series of op-ed pieces published by the Washington Post on the subject of religion and evolution. The latest of these, by Paula Kirby, has left me scratching my head somewhat. I've seen many people try to claim that evolution invalidates religious belief, but this is the first time I've seen someone try to argue that evolution is so nasty that no merciful god would have used it as a mechanism of creation. Or, in Kirby's words -

"Evolution produces some wondrously beautiful results; but it happens at the cost of unimaginable suffering on the part of countless billions of individuals and, indeed, whole species, 99 percent of which have so far become extinct. It is irreconcilable with a god of love."

Let's stop for a moment and consider the concept of "species suffering." How, exactly, does a species suffer? Does it have a collective consciousness that is, in some way, aware that it is failing? Is there a sense of unrealized potential - "only 500,000 years? Why, oh Lord? Why?" Perhaps this is leavened by hope for the future; the expiring species takes comfort as it "sees" a closely-related sister taxon thriving and diversifying, much like an old man dying at home, surrounded by children and grandchildren. Was there, perhaps, a point where the last dodo, unable to find a mate, wept bitter tears at the thought that its species might have had an eternity of existence if only those pesky Dutchmen hadn't come along?

No, of course not. This is a silly line of argument and it illustrates why I don't waste my time writing about evolution and religion. It's a debate that is mostly characterized by ignorance. Critiques of evolution tend to be written by people who know little or nothing about evolutionary biology; critiques of religion tend to be written by people who know little or nothing about theology. Consequently the discussion never rises above the level of high school debate team. "Evolution is a 'theory' not a 'fact.'" "There can't be a god, because there are wars and bad things happen to good people." "Humans can't have evolved from apes, because apes are still alive." "If there's a god, why can't I see him?" "Flagellae and eyes are too complex to have evolved without the assistance of a designer." "I know there can't be a god, because of Occam's Razor." Call me an old stick in the mud, but if I was smart enough to be reading op-ed pieces in heavyweight papers like the Washington Post, I'd want something with a bit more academic rigor to go with my cornflakes.

Sorry for the rant, but that "species suffering" business really yanked my chain.

Minnesota Mystery Animal

2011-08-09T17:52:00.000-04:00

It's a badger. But well done to Discovery blogger Benjamin Radford for taking the time to unpack the reasons why it's still a badger, even if it looks weird. As he says:

"...if we see a three-legged dog by the side of the road we don’t assume that it must be a previously unknown breed of three-legged dogs that science has not discovered. Instead we logically assume that the dog likely lost its leg through an accident or birth defect. Yet when it comes to other known animals with a strange appearance, people often reach for extraordinary explanations instead of logical ones."

Blogo

2011-08-09T17:25:00.002-04:00

The Smithsonian has launched a new blog called the Department of Innovation. Apparently it will cover “all things innovative, not just in science and technology but how we live, how we learn, and how we entertain ourselves.” Unfortunately, rather than highlighting the exciting new content of the blog, my fellows denizens of the blogosphere have gleefully latched onto its logo. Their amusement lies in the fact that there is apparently no way that the three interlocking gear wheels can move - the whole system is locked-up. Here at PoH, however, we pride ourselves with more detailed analysis, which reveals that there is - just - enough of a gap between wheels 2 and 3 to allow movement. So if this logo is, as some have claimed, a representation of the three branches of the U.S. Government, then perhaps that tiny gap represents compromise. I'll leave you to decide. (with thanks to Sally for sharing).

A few quick updates...

2011-07-30T15:08:00.002-04:00

It's been another lousy month for me where blogging is concerned, but before July fizzles out I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of interesting things. First, there's been another addition to the growing list of natural history collection blogs, in the form of Elee Kirk's 'Stuffed Stuff: Adventures in Natural History Museums and Taxidermy'; it's fun, and if you're at all interested in the weird and wonderful side of our profession, I certainly urge you to go take a look.

Next, Carl Zimmer kindly drew my attention to this excellent conference. Sadly, I shall be attending another meeting in late October, but if you live in Pennsylvania and believe that you share your beautiful state with large, hairy, non-human primates, this is the meeting for you. As a bonus, you get to hear about aliens as well!

While we're on the subject of cryptozoology, it's summertime, which invariably means British big cat sightings. As you may recall, we've discussed this phenomenon in an earlier post; no need to rehash it here, other than to note that the British big cat cryptozoology community was dealt a body blow two weeks ago with the closure of its professional journal, the News of the World. Anyhoo, it's my home state that has been making the running in the puma stakes recently.

First, puma sightings in Greenwich, CT back in May turned out to be - amazingly - a puma! Then, even more amazing, it now seems that it walked here from South Dakota. Apparently young males often disperse long distances in search of mates. This one apparently took a wrong turn, hiking 1,500 miles in search of sex, only to be run down by a car. As my colleague Greg noted, this was the feline equivalent of Spring Break.

There are a few points here that set this apart from a British big cat story, and any readers of a cryptozoological bent might want to take note of them. First, there was "evidence," in the form of 140lbs of dead puma, rather than a blurry photo of next door's cat. Next, "science" (as opposed to the preferred crptozoological methodology of "guess") was used to show that the animal was actually from a known population of cougars, rather than some long-lost population of the Eastern cougar that had survived since the 1930s without anyone noticing.

Third, cougars are actually native to North America and this one walked here, an option not available to any cougar wishing to colonize Britain. Finally, despite the fact that we live in a heavily wooded state, with nearly 60% forest cover and abundant deer, this thing still ended up dead on a highway with an empty stomach. So how long do you think it would have lasted in, say, Gloucestershire?

But We Should Be Glad We Have It At All

2011-07-10T11:37:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I was driving into Niantic, CT, behind a large black SUV. It's always interesting when someone's vehicle provides a comprehensive summary of their socio-political beliefs. In this case, we had military (Maine veteran's plates, USMC sticker, "support our troops" sticker, Vietnam Vet sticker), religion ("Keep Christ in Christmas," "Abortion Stills a Beating Heart," "106.7 The Promise FM," "Knights of Columbus"), 2nd Amendment (NRA sticker, "Just Try and Take It" superimposed over the silhouette of an M-16), and the catch all "I Love The USA!" No Discovery Institute sticker, so I guess there's the faint hope that they're opponents of equal time for ID, but I wouldn't put money on it.

People like this tend be big fans of the sort of "exposé" recently published by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). The Coburn Report pupports to demonstrate how NSF is wasting taxpayer funds on worthless research. Now don't get him wrong. Sen. Coburn is not anti-science; he just wants NSF to fund useful science (my guess is that this encompasses bigger bombs and cures for the various afflications that affect his aging constituency of angry white male voters; lumbago, prostate cancer, and erectile disfunction are biggies, I suspect). NSF does do this, the report grudgingly acknowledges, but it also spends too much money on "indulging the curiosity of scientists."

Setting aside the fact that "the curiosity of scientists" is what has generated all of the useful science that Sen. Coburn claims to be a fan of, the report is an object lesson of some of the challenges faced by agencies like NSF. It is a masterpiece of dissembling. Even assuming that the examples of research cited by the report are "wasteful," they amount to a tiny fraction (<0.01%) of NSF's annual budget. Is everything else "wasteful?" Well, we don't know. What we *do* know is that everything that was funded went through peer review, which is a far more vigorous process of assessment than the review carried out by the wonks in Coburn's office.

That is not to disparage Coburn's staffers because they clearly have considerable talents in the black arts of politics. Note how the report takes NSF's principal strength - the claim that it funds "transformative research" - and turns it into a weapon. OK, the report asks - how much of the research funded by NSF is genuinely "transformative?" The answer, of course, is not much. By its very nature, transformative research tends to be both rare and difficult to identify in advance. For a funding agency to claim that this is its primary objective is both an ambitious goal and a hostage to fortune, something that Coburn and his staff quickly recognized.

One way to counter arguments like this is to find new ways to talk to the taxpaying public through education and outreach. The risk, of course, in developing rap videos for kids that explain scientific concepts (See Money 4 Drugz) is that it's terriby easy to point to this as a misuse of taxpayer funds for an apparently trivial activity. The fact that the $50,000 quoted by the report didn't actually pay for this video or any others (it was a networking grant looking at novel outreach methods) is by-the-by. It's possible to shoot down pretty much every claim made in the report - see here for a point-by-point rebuttal by one of the researchers cited by Coburn - but it takes time and it's unlikely to be read by the man in the black SUV.

Does this matter? Absolutely. It's likely that in the near future the US House of Representatives will be looking at the fiscal year (FY) 2012 appropriations bill that will fund NSF. Less money for NSF means less money for ADBC, CSBR, and all the other programs that we care about. So if you are a U.S. Citizen (be you Republican, Democrat, or Independent) reading this and you care about any of the things that I've been described in this blog over the past couple of years, follow this link and do something about it.

[OK, that's it with the US-centric stuff. Normal service will be resumed shortly]

.... While the Other Taketh Away?

2011-07-10T11:36:00.002-04:00

We're all grateful for ADBC, of course, but what to make of the merging of the Improvements to Biological Research Collections (BRC) and Living Stock Collections for Biological Research (LSCBR) programs into a single, new program, Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR). At first sight, it seems like there's nothing too alarming in here. The total funding for the new program is a bit less that the combined total for the two former ones ($6.5M vs $7M) but then cost-cutting is very much the flavor of the hour and it can't really be argued that NSF have robbed Peter to pay Paul by taking funds away from BRC to create ADBC. Or can it?

The solicitation for CSBR makes it absolute clear that, for natural history collections, it "requires that the activities funded through this Program interface with the soon to be announced national Home Uniting Biocollections (HUB) established and supported by the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) Program." And if that weren't explicit enough - "As a part of the improvements to collections, all specimens handled---if not already digitized--- should be digitized and the data linked to the national resource for digitized biocollections." So the aims of CSBR are very explicitly tied to ADBC.

Is this a bad thing? Yes and no (you can tell I'm Libran, right?). In developing the national strategy for collections digitization, it was always clear that no one program, or agency, would be able to support this process, so maximizing bang for buck by having other, related programs contribute to national digitization objectives is a good thing. On the minus side, BRC was one of the major sources of support for capital upgrades to collections and this role may now be jeopardized.

How so? Well, consider this. There was a ceiling of $500K for single institution BRC grants which has carried over into the new CSBR program. This sounds like a lot of money, but it gets spent surprisingly quickly. With fringe benefits and indirect costs, a single new staff member can eat half of this. While we all hope that new technologies and improvements to collections workflows will make our lives easier, the fact remains that the biggest barrier to large scale collections digitization is the availability of staff. If you spend funds on new staff for the mandated digitization component of your CSBR project, how much money will be left for new cabinets, compact storage systems, etc?

Prioritization is a good thing, and it was important to prioritize digitization as a national objective because of its potential to massively increase the scope and impact of collections as a resource for the support of science. But at the same time, it would be a pity if this were to bring a halt to the great strides that have been made under BRC in improving the physical wellbeing of collections.

One Hand Giveth....

2011-07-10T11:35:00.000-04:00

[I apologize to my non-US readers for a flurry of postings that will be of limited interest to them. Rest assured that I will be back to writing about bogus puma sightings in Devon in the very near future]

For the last few months, rather like Britain and France during 1939/40, we've been engaged in a bit of a Phoney War; everyone knows that something big is coming, but nothing has actually happened yet. So it's with a sigh of relief that I can finally report that the first round of grants under NSF's Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program has been announced. You can read all about them here, but in a nutshell there are now three large-scale collections digitization networks, focusing on invertebrate collections, insect/plant interactions, and North American lichens and bryophytes. Hopefully these will be the first of many.

The whole program will be coordinated by a national center at the University of Floride, known as iDigBio, under the direction of Larry Page. They have some exciting plans, which you can read all about on their new blog. They were also kind enough to include PoH on their blogroll, which would have earnt them a plug even if this weren't a very important program for all the reasons that I've mentioned over the past year or so (click on the "digitization" tag in the tag-cloud on the right if you want to rehash all of this).

One of the most impressive aspects of this first round is the sheer number of collections that are involved in the first round - 92 institutions in 45 states. This breadth of coverage is important, because from an early stage it's been clear that one of the biggest challenges for a national digitization program is going to be engaging and motivating all those collections who don't get any direct funding under ADBC. So community engagement will need to be a big part of the work of iDigBio.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I was part of an unsuccessful proposal under ADBC, so this has all been something of a bittersweet experience - great satisfaction to see the program up and running in such a short period of time, anticipation for what will be achieved, and regret that I'll be watching it happen from a distance rather than participating directly. On the other hand, I do get to spend more time in my garden....

Science and Media

2011-06-28T11:12:00.001-04:00

This painting from the Optimistic Paintings Blog says it all, as far as paleontology and the media is concerned. Thanks to Christine for sharing...

Busted

2011-06-28T09:51:00.000-04:00

You have to feel a little sorry for my former boss, Mark. Having spent more than 30 years cultivating a cool persona, he has had it blown to shreds by this, frankly hagiographic, piece in the Wall Street Journal. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, but there is nothing more uncool than being publicly outed as cool. Unless it's being publicly outed as the second coolest person in the world.....

Yours For a Price

2011-06-10T13:06:00.001-04:00

I don't know about you but, while I accept the right of private dealers to make a living, I find natural history auction catalogs deeply depressing. Consider, for example, the catalog for Heritage Auctions June 11, 2011 sale, which is taking place in Dallas, Texas. I would particularly like to draw your attention to Lot #49053, a slice from the Williamette Meteorite. The Williamette, a 15 ton iron/nickel monster from Oregon, is one of the flagship specimens of the American Museum of Natural History. It is also a sacred object for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. This led to various requests for repatriation in the past, culminating in a landmark agreement between the AMNH and the Grand Ronde that allows tribal members to conduct a private ceremony around the meteorite once a year. It also stipulates that ownership of the meteorite will be transferred to Grand Ronde should the Museum cease display it.

So far, so good. But by now you might be wondering what a 30lb chunk of this sacred object is doing sat in an auction house in Dallas. If you want to know the full history, take a look at the auction catalog and this 2007 article from the New York Times. You can draw your own conclusions from them. But what does it say about the private market in natural history that one of the major selling points for this object is the Museum's recognition that the act of sampling is so sacriligious to the Grand Ronde that it should no longer be allowed? And that the Robb Report lists Tomanowos, representative of the Sky People to the Clackamas, as one of the "21 Ultimate Gifts" for 2011?

Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty

2011-06-06T13:56:00.002-04:00

Things have come to a pretty pass when I use a post as an opportunity to namecheck a Dusty Springfield album (even if it happens to be my mother's favorite record). But in this case it helps to highlight a pet peeve of mine, which is the tendency for journalists (some of whom should know better) to refer reflexly to all museum collections as "dusty." The latest one to draw my ire is David Malakoff, who wrote a piece in Conservation Magazine describing how isotopic studies based on museum skins have demonstrated that macaque monkeys in Singapore are now feeding at a lower trophic level as a result of biodiversity losses. A great example of how the historic data stored in collections can be used to address pressing research issues, undermined only by the author's assumption that they are housed in the institutional equivalent of a mad uncle's attic.

Anyway, I was all fired up to comment on this, but my Canadian colleage Judith got there first. Apparently she uses Twitter to track this stuff. So I had to be the third comment, which made me look less than cutting edge.

"Antiquated"

2011-05-24T20:35:00.002-04:00

Sad to say, there's news of another proposed museum cut, in this case the ornithology program at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History, which is part of the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Here's the email from the ornithology curator, John Klicka. Note particularly paragraph 2; admittedly it's not a direct quote from UNLV's VP for Research, but the statement about museum work being "antiquated and no longer relevant in the modern world," if true, is quite extraordinary. Even a cursory glance at this group's publication list shows that they are using a mixture of molecular and morphological techniques to address real issues in conservation, wildlife management, and environmental change; the journals that they are publishing in are indicative of its quality. As a former university administrator, I normally heave a deep sigh when I hear my colleagues go off on the iniquities of their administrations, but even I'd have to admit that this one takes the biscuit.

-----------------------

EMAIL FROM: John Klicka klicka@unlv.nevada.edu

Dear Colleagues:

As many of you have likely heard, due to a prolonged economic downturn in Nevada the Curator of Birds position at the Marjorie Barrick Museum will likely lose its state funding after July 2011. This decision was ultimately made by the University's Vice President for Research (a long-term administrator, formerly a chair in the Sociology Department). The Director of my academic unit (Dr. Oliver Hemmers [Oliver.hemmers@unlv.edu], an expert in X-ray atomic and molecular spectroscopy) has suggested that it might be helpful if I solicited some opinions from outside sources that would argue in support of the continued operation of the Ornithology program at the Barrick Museum.

The immediate problems appear to be two-fold. First, Oliver has told me that the VP for Research believes that museum work is antiquated and no longer relevant in the modern world. He needs to be informed that the type of work being done in the Ornithology program is of critical importance in these days of disappearing habitats and climate change. Second, the VP for Research is apparently under the impression that nearly all we do in this program is collect, prepare, and catalogue specimens. Of course, as specimen-based researchers our group does these things, but the program has also been very productive with respect to student training and original research. Since 2006 we have produced 26 peer-reviewed publications and have given 22 presentations at national or international meetings (see web links below). The single state line associated with this program (the Curator position) thus produces a considerable return for the University. Our VP for Research needs to be informed that we do better than average work here, and that despite its small size, the Barrick Museum Ornithology Program and its collections have put UNLV on the map in the Ornithological world at an international level.

If this sounds like a desperate, last-ditch effort to save yet another museum program from disappearing, it is. It is possible that the VP for Research may not change his mind, but I'd like for him to know that some very qualified people recognize the important contributions that this program makes to UNLV and to science and that they (you) do not approve of his decision. If you choose to help, please expand on the themes mentioned above and send your views to Dr. Oliver Hemmers at oliver.hemmers@unlv.edu (and please CC me). Your support is much appreciated.

Regards, --John Klicka

Publications here: http://barrickmuseum.unlv.edu/ornithology/publications.html
Students here: http://barrickmuseum.unlv.edu/ornithology/personnel.html

--
John Klicka
Curator of Birds
Marjorie Barrick Muse.of Natural History
University of Nevada Las Vegas
4505 Maryland Parkway - Box 454012
Las Vegas, NV 89154-4012

Challenges

2011-05-24T14:56:00.000-04:00

Speaking of the challenges of exhibits, here's one that's been bugging me lately. This little guy (see left) is Tremataspis. It's an early vertebrate that lived about 420 million years ago in what's now Estonia. Let's just stop for a moment to consider that number 420 million. That's a long time ago. It's almost 200 million years older than the oldest known dinosaur, six times older than that relative newbie T. rex, and a whopping 235 times older than our own species, Homo sapiens. It inhabited a planet that would have been totally alien to us. The Silurian world had a greenhouse climate, with an atmosphere so rich in carbon dioxide that it would have been almost unbreathable for humans, wracked by huge storms that were driven by warm seas that covered the entire northern hemisphere.

Terrestrial plant and animal life was in its evolutionary infancy and most of the planet's biota was aquatic. Unlike today, vertebrates occupied a relatively lowly position in the food chain, which was dominated by large predatory invertebrates. To compensate for this, early vertebrates often had hard, bony armour covering all or part of their bodies. In Tremataspis this armour was confined to the head, which was completely encased in bone - the animal peered out at a hostile world through a hole on top of its head, the biological equivalent of a view-port in a tank. It's this head shield that gets preserved in the fossil record - if you click on the photo, you can see the view port and imagine a small pair of eyes staring out at you (OK, maybe not the last bit, unless you have a very overactive imagination). On the underside is a small mouth that has no jaws - Tremataspis and its relatives diverged from the "main" path of vertebrate evolution before jaws evolved (from modified gill arches). It is, to our eyes, a deeply weird animal. But it's also a distant relative of ours - part of our (very extended) family tree.

We'd like to use Tremataspis to help show visitors that the world of 420 million years ago was a very different place, as part of the wider story of our changing planet that will be told by the new fossil galleries at the Peabody. And this is a great fossil of Tremataspis. The problem is that it's tiny - not much bigger than my thumbnail. Viewed quickly, it looks - dare I whisper it? - a little unimpressive. When we were first evaluating fossils for the exhibit, working from photos, we discarded all of the Silurian vertebrates as being unworthy of display. It was only when I went back into the collections to look at the fossils myself that I realized just how stunning this little guy is. The challenge is how to get people to appreciate this when Tremataspis has to share a gallery with multi-ton bruisers like Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops.

It's one of the many paradoxes of paleontology that some of the most important material we have is also some of the least impressive to look at. It's easy for the public to understand why someone could spend a lifetime studying T. rex; it's less easy to understand why another paleontologist might spend decades sieving the sediment from around a T. rex in search of microscopic mammal teeth. But I'm guessing that for many paleontologists, the discovery of the first Cretaceous primate would far exceed the importance of another tyrannosaur. Well, I'd think it was more important. The old maxim that size isn't everything is never so true as when it's applied to paleontology and this is another message that we'd like to get across through our displays.

Historically, museums have adopted various strategies to try to get the public interested in visually unimpressive specimens. Models are one possible solution; artwork another. But one needs to be careful. As a child, I was convinced that the Natural History Museum in London was the owner of a stuffed dodo. As I later discovered, of course, the "dodo" was actually a Rowland Ward model made from plaster and goose feathers. The actual "most complete dodo," which resides in Oxford, is an infinitely more important specimen and very moving - when, after some years working there, I finally got to hold the skull with its withered skin and feather stubs I had a "moment" - a rare occurrence for me (as the regular reader will know, I tend to take a very unemotive view of the material I look after). We did eventually add a model (and a composite skeleton) to the Oxford exhibit, but the more I look back on this, the more I wonder whether we didn't end up disrespecting the actual specimen.

One solution that we've discussed is to treat these tiny fossils like the jewels they are - use a combination of spotlighting and a tiny specimen in a large case to draw the visitor in. Another is to use a bigger fossil as a hook. Placing Tremataspis alongside an 8 foot long predatory arthropod from the same period makes a powerful statement about a world that was so different that our distant ancestors were menaced by something that today we'd probably make into Thermidor.

A Conversation

2011-05-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

It's always nice when people respond to things I post. As the regular reader will know, over the past couple of years I've written some quite critical things about Thomas H. Benton and his views on natural history museums. After my most recent post on this subject, where I acknowledged that he might have a point where some museums are concerned, he was kind enough to get in touch - you can read his response at the bottom of the post. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we're going to meet in a month or so to walk around the galleries at ANSP and have a convesation about the challenges of exhibiting natural history, which I hope will be posted here shortly thereafter. I'm looking forward to it.

No, I'm Not Dead...

2011-05-23T09:37:00.000-04:00

... and neither have I been Raptured. I've taken up gardening and it's planting season. What can I say? 250 Pachysandra can play hell with your typing skills.

I Was Glad

2011-04-29T08:19:00.002-04:00

I came downstairs this morning to find the pink-cheeked and strangely featureless visage of David Cameron bellowing Jerusalem out of my TV screen in hi-def. For a moment I was disconcerted. Then a strange wave of calm washed over me. You may wake up in Britain next week with no job, no healthcare, no police, no museums or libraries, crippling university fees, and the Liberal Democrats demolishing your electoral system so that their odious brand of unprincipled and opportunistic politics will have a stranglehold on power for decades to come. But relax. After years of false Labour egalitarianism, once again you live in a country run by Old Etonians and people called St John and Ffoulkes, where even the daughter of flight attendants can grow up to be a queen, provided they have the gumption to make themselves into millionaires. Rest easy, Britain - all is well.

An Apology?

2011-04-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

The regular reader of this blog will recall that, at regular intervals, I have got myself quite upset over the writings of Thomas H. Benton, a self-described expert on natural history museums who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Benton's pooterish diatribes on the decline of the natural history museum seemed to me to be little more than an unwarranted assault on modern exhibit design, the principles of which had completely eluded the author.

Or so I thought.

A couple of weeks ago, I paid my first visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yes, I know, this is quite unforgiveable for one who has lived in the Northeast for years, but honestly, I'm quite a busy person. Founded in 1812, the Academy is the oldest natural history museum in the Americas, a storied research institution with a noble history and a long tradition of public exhibits and educational programs for both schools and the general public.

It is also very dear to Thomas H. Benton's heart; it was a visit to the Academy that sparked the first of his polemics. There have been several since then, but the one that offended me most was his assertion that museums that display casts of fossil specimens are engaging in fraudulent behavior at the expense of their visitors. I took issue with this on a number of grounds, one of which is that reputable museums have a series of safeguards that ensure that the visitor is always aware what is real and what is a cast. So I have to say that I was a little shocked when I took a walk around the fossil gallery in Philadelphia.

As you can see from the photo above, it is packed full of skeletons. Almost all of these are casts. Virtually none of them are labelled as such. There's no information on where the original specimen actually came from - for example, I was pretty sure that their Tylosaurus skeleton was a cast of a specimen from western Kansas, the original of which is in the collections of the University of Kansas, but there's no way of telling that from the exhibit label. This information may seem geeky, but it's actually very important because it links the reproduction to the actual specimen, which is a real occurence of the animal in time and space. Without that data, you might as well just buy a model.

To be fair, some of this information is available on the Academy's website (for an example, see http://www.ansp.org/museum/dinohall/tylosaurus.php), but there's a bigger issue here. The Academy is the birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology, the home institution of Joseph Leidy, with a collection of over 22,000 specimens that includes the first remains of a dinosaur (beyond isolated teeth) from North America. Very little of this is on display. One or two casts would be fine, but is a whole army of reproductions justifiable in a museum that has an actual VP collection (and a very good one) and which continues to do high quality paleontological research? Surely more of this should be accessible to visitors through the displays?

I still believe that my original anti-Bentonian argument holds true - casts have a role to play, not least by generating an appropriate sense of awe in visitors, especially smaller ones. But I can't help thinking that the Academy's fossil gallery has crossed a line.

More Digitization

2011-04-27T09:18:00.000-04:00

After spending a lot of time writing about collections digitization on this blog, I'm delighted that someone else has now created a blog dedicated to this topic. So You Think You Can Digitize is a collaboration between a biodiversity scientist, Rob Guralnick, and a data curator, Andrea Thomer. Go read it. They're much funnier than I am.

From a Visitor to MoMA

2011-04-27T08:57:00.000-04:00

Says it all, really...

Old Specimens, New Pespectives

2011-04-19T16:58:00.000-04:00

Many of you will, I hope, have explored the excellent New Light on Old Bones blog at the Manchester Museum. If you're interested in the wider context of this project then I highly recomend downloading their report (PDF). This was a novel and important effort to look at the broader context of natural history specimens, interpreting them from a social sciences and humanities perspective. It's a timely reminder both of the continuing value of these collections (which is not limited to the support of scientific endeavour), and also of the sort of project that will be difficult to support after the demise of the MLA.

Crowdsourced Fish

2011-04-19T16:47:00.000-04:00

At the recent Museums and the Web Conference in Philadelphia, there was much talk about this project at the Smithsonian, which used Facebook to mediate a project to rapidly identify 5,000 fish specimens from Guyana. Within a week, they managed to get genus-level identifications for around 90% of specimens. Admittedly this wasn't Joe Public doing the IDs - the majority of people commenting held a Ph.D. in ichthyology - but the global scope of the respondents was impressive, as was the speed with which the task was accomplished. For those of you who think social networking is a waste of time, perhaps it's time you thought again.

Yet Another Peabody Blog

2011-03-31T13:55:00.000-04:00

Ariel Revan, a senior major in the Geology and Geophysics Department, recently retuned from a week long trip to Switzerland, where she was looking at the skeletal anatomy of Stegosaurus. Her work will feed into the remounting of our stegosaur skeleton at the Peabody, which we're hoping to do as part of the fossil hall renovations. You can read about her trip here. Do you think there's nothing more to learn about such a familiar dinosaur? Well, read on....

All The Rest

2011-03-31T13:49:00.001-04:00

Here's all the other cool stuff that I might have blogged about if I hadn't been setting up our digitization meeting in Chicago. The Peabody Museum collections were featured in a very nice article by Suzanne Taylor Muzzin for the Yale Daily Bulletin - if you have Flash, you can also take at the slideshow, which features my hands in slides 5 and 6. Speaking of university museums, Sally MacDonald and Jack Ashby talk about the importance of university science collections in this Nature article (pdf), while over at TREE Adrian Lister reports on the importance of natural history collections as sources of long-term datasets (Lister & CCRG, 2011. TREE, 26(4): 153-154), which is a good thing given the growing emphasis on data mining as a source of novel research. A couple of weeks back, an international group of eight research funders, including our old friends IMLS and NSF, announced the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge, which is intended to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences - you can read more about this here. The Independent published another depressing article on the decline of taxonomy as an academic discipline, which would be welcome if it made a difference (sadly I fear it won't). But the winner as far as this month's news is concerned was the widely reported discovery of Nuralagus rex, a giant rabbit from the Pliocene of Minorca, which is described by Meike Kohler and Salvador Moya-Sola in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Popular press accounts tend to dwell on the fact that Nuralagus was "six times the size of most rabbits today." Note that they say "most" rabbits - as the proud owner of a 20lb bunny, I can testify that most does not equal all.

Management

2011-03-31T13:13:00.000-04:00

Yale's School of Management is situated just across Sachem Avenue from the Peabody. To walk there from my office takes only a few minutes, but I always thought the mental journey would be a lot longer. For me, the gulf between museum and management was perfectly illustrated by the Nissan GT-R that is often parked on Hillhouse outside the SoM. I don't know whether it belongs to a member of the Management faculty, but that is not beyond the bounds of possibility. On the other hand, I can be absolutely sure that it doesn't belong to anyone from Peabody. We're not really a GT-R sort of place.

Having spent some time over the past few weeks talking to management researchers, I'm thinking it's high time I revised my impressions. No doubt there are some aspects of management theory that are quite esoteric, and others that are quite lucrative, but the people I've met seem eminantly sensible and quite down to earth. But that may be because they are also engineers.

Time to back up a little. The regular reader of this blog (and yes, there is one) will be aware of the ongoing efforts to digitize biological collections across the USA. If you're not and you're interested, click on the tag marked "digitization" at the bottom of this post and you'll find out more than you ever wanted to know. One of the major challenges to mobilizing the mountain of collections data is the sheer size of the task. No-one really knows how many natural history specimens there are in American collections, but 1 billion is probably the right order of magnitude. Museum workers have been databasing their collections for over 20 years now and have captured less than 10 percent of this material; there's not much evidence to show that the rate of capture has improved significantly, so clearly some new insights are needed.

Last week, I got to go to a meeting in Chicago where we brought together a group of collection managers, curators, software designers, and - yes - management scientists, to look at what we might do to improve matters. There will, in due course, be a report (which I will post here for those who are interested) but for now I will offer up a simple explanation of why we need help.

Part of the reason for holding the meeting in Chicago last week was the presence of Automate 2011, the largest trade show for industrial robotics. My colleagues and I tend to get quite excited by robotics, because of our touching faith that machines may replace the staff that we can no longer afford to employ. Going to shows like Automate tends to reinforce that impression, as you watch robots manipulate tiny and often very fragile objects at blinding speed, using machine vision to identify, sort, and process. Then you ask the sales guy and find that you can apparently purchase one of these babies for less than a Toyota Camry (I don't know what's going on with the car analogies today - sorry). There were those among us who were already reaching for our checkbooks.

This is why you need to go to tradeshows with an industrial engineer. "Not so fast," says my new friend Brian from MIT. Installing a robot in your collection is not so easy. First, they're not plug and play. Each unit requires a bunch of operating software and support hardware that costs as much, if not more, than the robot itself. Even if you have all of the pieces, setting it up can be a considerable challenge - a whole masters thesis can be written on the process of simply delivering the object to the robot, which is different for each application. Most of these robots are designed for dealing with industrial components, which are generally highly consistent in size, shape, etc. Even the wrinkled corner of a herbarium sheet would be sufficient to shut them down. Robots can deal with variation, but it massively increases the cost. And when they break down (which happens not infrequently) you need a trained operator onsite to deal with the problems. And robot specialists are not cheap.

Consider Amazon. You might assume that a massive company like this, with a pretty standard operating model (they have big warehouses full of books that they need to deliver to buyers) would be highly automated. "Not so," says another new friend, Don from the University of Chicago's School of Management. Amazon has people pushing carts up and down the aisles of its warehouses. The reason why is that books are highly variable - in size, shape, and weight. By the time you've factored all of this into your the design of your robot, it ends up being cheaper to employ people to do the job. If this is a problem for Amazon, how much more of a problem will it be for us.

So what can we do? Well, I'm not going to tell you everything now, otherwise you'll never read the report, but here's one lesson we learnt. In any workflow, including specimen digitization, there are a number of stages. Each of those stages will have a maximum rate - the fastest speed at which an object can pass through it. The stage with the slowest rate is the bottleneck and it will determine the overall speed of the process - however much you increase the speed of the other stages, you can never go faster than the speed of the bottleneck. For this reason, all of the rest of your workflow should be designed to feed the bottleneck - it should never be idle. Bottlenecks are usually the most expensive part of the workflow - in digitization, for example, it might be the camera or a scanner. So in designing any project, the first task is to find the bottleneck.

This is process management 101. But how many of us sit down and model workflows when we start a collections project? And how many of us write these up and publish them so that, as a community, we don't reinvent the wheel for every new project we start? Technology - software and hardware - will undoubtably provide some of the answers to the challenge of collections digitization. But the best start might be to get a more structured understanding of what we actually do.

Hot Stuff

2011-03-12T11:28:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I last posted on the subject of the Peabody fossil halls project, which is not to say that we've been doing nothing - architects have been engaged, designers are being interviewed, and generally the planning process grinds ahead. There's still the question of the money of course.... but let's not dwell on that. Neither will I dwell on the seemingly endless process of figuring out where we will store all the specimens involved, or the amount of space that they will take up (currently estimated at over 4 times the floor area of my house). I am heartily sick of spreadsheets.

On the plus side, however, we do get to do a lot fun stuff as well. Some of this involves figuring out the underlying narrative, which as you may recall is one of changing environments through time. For most people, "environmental change" conjures up images of drowning polar bears and a bald Mount Kilimanjaro, or - if you have an alternative political mindset - no-good socialist tree huggers and their mendacious scientific fellow travellers. Trying to get across the point that global climate is a fluid system that has always been changing is a challenge, not least because one side sees this as a reason why they shouldn't lose any sleep over driving to the mall in their Hummer.

This is why we've been talking to a man called Tony Leiserowitz. Tony is the Director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Tony and his co-workers developed the concept of the Six Americas for undertsanding public perceptions of climate change, a fascinating study that should be required reading for anyone working in informal science education, especially in a natural history museum. Among the most interesting facts that I gleaned from the study is that climate change skeptics actually have a better understanding of the Greenhouse Effect than people that are passionate activists for change, who tend to get all confused about ozone holes and aerosols.

Plainly the redesign of our fossil halls with an environmental theme represents a teachable moment for public understanding of climate change. But what do we actually tell them. One school of thought within our group is all for pushing anthropogenic climate change hard - cue pictures of drowning polar bears, dried up lake beds, and the bald Mount Kilimanjaro, together with a strong message about sustainability, recycling, reduction of carbon emissions, Toyata Priuses, etc. Another line of thought runs that we are talking about Earth history and we should actively avoid trying to tackle the future, leaving our visitors to draw their own conclusions from what they've seen.

My sense is that we'll probably chart some sort of middle course. There is no way that one could emerge from our planned fossil galleries without a sense that the Earth has changed over time - in a very real sense the world of the Silurian, for example, was a different planet to the one we live on today, with a different atmosphere, different day lengths, and devoid of almost all terrestrial life. It's a sobering thought that, while Homo sapiens has been around for 200,000 years, the achievements that make us what we are - agriculture, domestication, civilization, technology - have all occurred in the last 10,000 years, a period of great climatic stability. When the climate does change, the impact on civilization can be dramatic - consider the Maya of Central America, the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, or the effects of the Little Ice Age in Europe. On a geological scale these changes are no more than blips, but their effects on us have been profound. This is something that we will need to explore and it naturally leads to the question of what will happen to our world given the global warming trend.

So one way forward might be to have visitors add the last chapter of our story themselves, by exploring their world (as represented by New Haven) under a series of different climate scenarios. Trying to show what the world will look like 100 years from now is a tricky exercise. The Museum of London tried to do this in a recent exhibition and attracted considerable flak from an unlikely coaltion of critics including both climate change skeptics and refugee rights advocates (quite an achievement to unite those guys under the same banner). This was understandable, because they were dumb. Showing the Household Cavalry mounted on camels and paddyfields in Parliament square might look cool, but these visions are not based on scientific projections or rooted in reality and because of this they are unconvincing for the bulk of the population.

Making sensible projections is important, not least because the work by Leiserowitz and his colleagues show that museums are still one of the most trusted sources of information on climate change. If we don't want our audience to decamp to Fox News, we need to be careful not to abuse that trust.

Saving America's Treasures

2011-03-12T10:24:00.002-05:00

I'm not one to blow my own horn, but as this was a collaborative project, co-written with my colleague Marilyn Fox and with help from a small army of Peabody and Yale staff - I think I can get away with it. A couple of weeks ago, we found out that we had been awarded a large grant by IMLS under the Save America's Treasures program - you can read more about the project here. The award of this grant sends an important message that O.C. Marsh's fossil collections are a national treasure, part of America's heritage.

This may seem obvious, but as we seek to emphasize the scientific importance and utility of the collections, it's important not to overlook their historical significance. Yale's scientific expeditions were part of the opening of the American West, with all the good and bad (in some cases very bad) that was attendant on that. The fossil deposits at Como Bluff, Wyoming, the source of some of the Peabody's most spectacular specimens, were discovered by workers on the transcontinental railroad. Without the spread of the railroads, it wouldn't have been possible to transport those huge bones back East.

Marsh was one of the first American scientists to accept Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection and his fossils were acknowledged by Darwin as providing critical support for his ideas. And beyond that, there are the names - Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops - familiar to generations of American children and deeply engrained into popular culture. Those names are anchored to the type specimens in the Yale collections, specimens whose long-term well-being and accessibility has been guaranteed by those IMLS funds.

Earth Shaking

2011-03-07T18:37:00.000-05:00

Two weeks after the disasterous earthquake in Canterbury, NZ, the situation at the Canterbury Museum is still unclear. Various reports floating around the web suggest that the sprinkler system triggered, but that this affected only a small area, although the collections haven't been fully inspected. The director, Anthony Wright, has apparently said that the building is structurally sound, but staff are unlikely to be allowed in for several weeks (if you haven't developed a business continuity plan for your institution yet, take note - things like this do actually happen).

Thankfully, although some lost their homes, none of the Museum's staff were hurt. This was a close run thing - at least one curator avoided being crushed by a large bookshelf only because he'd got up to answer the phone.

Black Hole

2011-03-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

Today I realized that it has been an extremely long time since I last posted anything on this blog. 16 days to be precise. I also noticed that I only managed 3 posts last month, a record low. The alert amongst you will recall that back at the beginning of February, I proudly stated that I had emerged from under a big pile of grant applications and was about to start blogging again with a vengeance. How was I to know that I'd have to provide a bunch of supplementary evidence for one of the proposals? And I guess I kinda ignored the fact that the workshop meeting on collections digitization that got funded through one of the earlier proposals wouldn't organize itself. Fortunately some very nice people at the Field Museum's Biodiversity Synthesis Center stepped in to help, which greatly reduced the pain. Anyway, I was going to apologize for the low frequency of posts. Then I thought "who cares?" So I'm not.

(Sorry)

Not Going To Say It

2011-02-19T16:10:00.003-05:00

It's not like I want to say "I told you so." Really, I don't. But you might recall that back in October I warned you that if you wanted to avoid a barrage of UK-type austerity cuts in Federal government programs, it would probably be better not to vote for the GOP in the mid-term elections. It's not like I needed a crystal ball to make that prediction. Anyway, if any of you were foolish enough to go ahead and do it anyway, here's what we're looking at now. I cherry-picked just a few of the more relevant examples from the long list of cuts proposed by the House Appropriations Committee for the last seven months of this fiscal year, which all-in-all amount to $74 billion. Yeah, that's right - $74 billion. And this only takes us up to July 1st, people:

Office of Science -$1.1B
NSF -$139M
USGS -$27M
Fish and Wildlife Service -$72M
Smithsonian -$7.3M
National Park Service -$51M
Forest Service -$38M
National Endowment for the Arts -$6M
National Endowment for the Humanities -$6M
NIH -$1B

And that's only the start. When the bill went to the House for debate this week there were nearly 600 amendments filed, proposing cuts to numerous agencies and programs. These could be formally offered as the House continues consideration of the bill. As AAM pointed out in a advocacy update on Friday, several of them target museums. Amendment #471, for example, filed by Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) would prohibit the use of funds provided by the bill to fund non-federal museums. Another amendment - #35, filed by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), would de-fund IMLS for the remainder of FY11. As I just got money from them, I take that one particularly personally.

Still, however lousy things are here you can still comfort yourself that you're not as badly off as my homeland. Over there, the Prime Minister has just realized he's cut so much government funding to charities that they can't take advantage of all the exciting opportunities presented by his Big Society initiative (you'll recall that's the plan to fire people and then make other people do their jobs for free). The solution to this is to use £100m of Government money to create a Big Society Bank, to enable charities to apply for funds that previously they'd have applied to the Government for.

If you're scratching your head over that, you're not the only one - no less a luminary than award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer admitted to me last week that he was "confused by your superior system of govt." And he's smart, he is. There will also be a £200m injection from UK banks. Which will be in the form of loans, which the Government will have to pay interest on, thus enabling the banks to cash in on UK taxpayers' hard earned money.

You remember the banks, right? The ones that got us in this mess in the first place?

Use and Abuse

2011-02-19T15:27:00.000-05:00

A friend recently sent me an amusing thread of emails from Mammal-L on the subject of IACUCs. For those of you who don't work on living animals, an IACUC, or Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, is the organization within your institution that reviews research protocols that involve the use of animal subjects and conducts evaluations of your institution's animal care. The system, which is a key plank of animal welfare legislation in the USA, was developed to deal with laboratory usage of animals, but its provisions also extend to fieldwork, including museum collecting; anyone wanting to collect vertebrates has to submit an animal use protocol for approval by IACUC. The collision of these two worlds provides ample opportunities for field biologists to complain about the lab-based eggheads that they have to deal with on the committee; I have a strong suspicion that the "eggheads" have their own roster of stories concerning bearded and gun-toting yahoos from organismal biology departmens.

What struck me most forcefully when reading the Mammal-L emails was the fact that these people, especially those from museums, should be down on their knees giving thanks for the existence of IACUCs. As I discussed last month, the day will come when someone will decide to take on the big natural history museums over their vertebrate collecting programs. When that day comes, we're going to need ample evidence that we make our collecting policies with certain principles built in - adequate scientific justification, minimization of the number of animals sacrificed, and humane methods. All the hoops, in fact, that those IUCAC eggheads make us jump through before we get our protocols approved. It still may not be enough. But without them, our days of rat and bat trapping are likely to be numbered.

Wah, wah, wah.

2011-02-19T14:51:00.000-05:00

OK, I know I said February 1st was my last grant deadline and that after that I'd be back to posting on PoH with a vengeance. But how was I to know that I'd get asked a bunch of questions about the proposal that we submitted in December? Or that the one we submitted last April would get awarded, meaning that we'd have a load of work to do. On top of the work that I'm already doing for the workshop that got funded from the grant we submitted in August. I know I sound like an ass for complaining, but honestly - it would be far easier if I just wrote them and had someone else do the work.

New Blog

2011-01-31T16:27:00.000-05:00

Here's another collection-oriented blog to add to the PoH blog-roll. The UCL Museums and Collections Blog features goings-on at the eight museums and collections of University College, London. It's a valuable addition to the growing number of blogs that are lifting the lid on life in collections, although quite what one makes of a post entitled "Poisoning Cats - Week 1" I'll leave you to decide for yourselves.

One Stop Chop Shop

2011-01-31T16:20:00.001-05:00

Regular readers of this blog will have been following the impact of government austerity measures on the UK museums community - for those who want a single source for the bad news, the Museum's Association has established this website. I recommend those of a sensitive disposition give it a miss....

Monkey Business

2011-01-31T16:04:00.001-05:00

This is one of those posts that you start and stop and start again, until you wonder whether it’s actually worth the bother. It may get me into trouble with some of you. But I'm going to do it anyway.

I'm not a huge fan of the BBC as an organization but I'd be the first to acknowledge the matchless quality of their programming, especially in the field of natural history. As an occasional taxonomist, however, I'm getting a bit leery of their involvement in high-profile efforts to catalog global biodiversity. This is important science, and it's good that the BBC is showing it to the public. But this recent piece, describing the possible discovery of a new species of lemur, got right on my wick.

As you’ll see from the article, the animal in question is a fork-marked lemur (genus Phaner). The process of collection involved darting the lemur, retrieving the tranquilized animal, taking some blood samples (and presumably some photos) and letting it go again. The “type specimen” of the lemur, assuming that it actually is a new species, will be the photos and the blood samples. There will be no voucher specimen.

This is the sort of thing that gets me quite exercised.

There are a number of reasons why the primatologist, Russ Mittermeier, may have chosen to go down this route. Many species of lemurs are rare, and killing one, even for scientific purposes, may have seemed unjustifiable for a Conservation International team. It may have sent the wrong message to local people working with the researchers (“it’s OK for us to hunt and kill them, but not you”). Given that the area where the lemur occurs is protected, they may not have had the necessary permits from the Malagasy government. But the cynic in me says that when you have a TV camera pointed at you, you don’t want to be seen euthanizing something that’s cute and cuddly with big eyes.

Here’s the flipside of this approach. First, any species whose long term viability can be significantly affected by the removal of one individual is already extinct. Natural mortality will far exceed this. Second, by pumping this small animal full of drugs and removing blood samples, you’ve already compromised its fitness. Studies of equivalent procedures in birds suggest that it increases mortality by up to 30%. Chances are that this little guy may have crawled off and died in a hole somewhere. Third, a blood sample and photograph can provide only a very limited amount of information about the species – a fraction of what could be obtained from a full body voucher specimen. No-one will be able to re-examine this type specimen to validate Mittermeier’s observations and if anyone has new questions they’ll have to go and collect another one – compromising the fitness of yet another individual.

The BBC piece notes breathlessly that “A strange structure under the lemur's tongue could also distinguish it from its closest relatives.” However, no-one will be able to investigate the anatomy of this structure, because they don’t have a specimen to dissect or scan. Even if they’d brought the thing back to a zoo and waited for it to die of old age, it would have been better. But no, we had to have the money shot of the sleepy lemur clambering back up the tree so that all those BBC watchers could feel warm and fuzzy in their living rooms.

I really hate to break this to people, but natural history museums are full of dead animals. And they didn’t get there by people going out and looking under bushes for ones that had died of old age. There are lively debates within the profession about the ethics of collecting; the ornithologists in particular have spent a considerable amount of time discussing the pros and cons as they relate to birds. But the fact remains that mortality due to scientific collection represents a tiny and non-additive fraction of natural mortality and is arguably the only form of death that has a positive outcome for the organism in terms of knowledge gained.

Perhaps I shouldn’t beat on the BBC about this. Fearing PETA-style direct action, many natural history museums are keen to soft-pedal the issue of what it is that we actually do behind those locked doors. I recall with amusement a discussion I had with a rather Orwellian public affairs office (of a museum that will remain nameless) over a press profile of one of my staff who worked in an osteology lab. Explaining why they wanted the piece spiked, our press officer informed me that “dead things and bones is not the message that we want to get across.” Safer to concentrate on things that are long dead (“Dinosaurs!”) or never alive (“Diamonds!”).

Compared to vivisection, the annual death toll from the activities of museums is vanishingly small and it's usually controlled by the same set of rigorous approval procedures for animal use; certainly there is no way that we could go out and collect vertebrates without having made a very strong justification first. But natural history museums are seen as “friendly” places, where kids go to marvel at nature, rather than scientific research institutions. Many of the best museums are both these things, but there is a major disconnect between what we show and what we do.

As we seek to break down the barriers between exhibits and collections – which, let’s remember, is a good thing – we will increasingly confront questions that make us uncomfortable. Is what we do cruel? How do our activities differ from lab-based animal research? How do we justify it? What mechanisms do we use to figure out if collection is justified? No-one wants to have to rehearse these issues in public, but we shouldn’t avoid them just for the sake of a quiet life. Or do weaker science because we don’t want to upset our audience.

Shameless Plug: AAM MAP Program

2011-01-29T14:24:00.000-05:00

I don't often do shameless plugs on this blog, but AAM's Museum Assessment Program (MAP) is such a good thing that it merited a post all of its own. MAP is an affordable way to strengthen your museum and achieve excellence. Within a year you get to conduct a self-study, consult with a museum professional and gain the tools to become a stronger institution. The program is open to small and mid-sized museums of all types, including zoos, aquariums, public gardens, history museums, art museums and children's museums. You can apply for one of three MAP assessments: Organizational, Collections Stewardship, or Community Engagement. If you want to do one this year, then you'd better get your skates on - the deadline for proposals is Feb 18. Click here to apply - and if you have any questions, MAP staff will be only too happy to answer them by phone (202-289-9118) or email (map@aam-us.org). What are you waiting for?

Modern Life is Rubbish

2011-01-29T14:10:00.002-05:00

I've really tried hard this month not to moan about workload. As a good friend of mine always says when I try to share my troubles, "nobody wants to hear it" (as you can tell, she must be a very good friend of mine if she says stuff like that). Anyway after submitting the last of the four grant applications that I've done in the past 6 months, it's high time we got back to the business of moaning about natural history collections and the people that work in them.

Some time ago, I made the decision to come off the Vertpaleo listserve because I was tired of inane "debates" cluttering up my in-box. Since then, I have been enjoying the relative peace that comes from subscribing only to listserves that deal with practical, work-related stuff. Like NHCOLL-L for example (typical post - "I have noticed a white precipitate at the bottom of a jar full of carp - does anyone know what it is?"). Over the last couple of weeks, however, NHCOLL has been hijacked (in a very polite way) by people who want to discuss "the extinction of natural history."

Digging around in the various posts, it became clear that what people really meant was the decline in the sort of integrative organismal biology that formed the backbone of undergraduate zoology and botany degrees for much of the last century, a frequent hobbyhorse for the sort of people that end up working in natural history museums. You might expect me to sympathize with these concerns. I went through one of the last of the classic organismal biology undergraduate degree courses in the UK, the old Zoology course at Oxford. I spent three terms dissecting my way through the animal kingdom from coelenterates to rats; did an ecology course that featured lectures on the role of giant tortoises on Aldabra Atoll; endlessly sampled the insect fauna of Wytham Woods, and spent hours recording the behavior of parasite-infested sticklebacks. It was enormous fun.

It also left me signally ill-equipped for life as a 21st Century biologist. I was so busy cutting up sea urchins and crawling around in the woods and fields of Oxfordshire brandishing my pooter that I managed to avoid any training in physiology, cell biology, genetics, molecular biology, or quantitative methods (which is how I ended up as a paleontologist, readers!). If the purpose of an undergraduate degree is to give you a grounding in the basics of your discipline, then mine failed me completely. I'm happy to say that the current generation of Oxford biologists fare rather better. If the new Biology degree curriculum seems a little bloodless, it does at least provide students with a broad foundation from which they can go on to pursue more specialized interests if they wish.

Moaning about the demise of organismal biology is a bit like complaining that we don't use steam trains any more, or lamenting the decline in fine penmanship. When we laud the insights achieved by 19th century naturalists like Darwin or Wallace it's easy to get forget that this was cutting edge science for its time, as much as sequencing robots and genomics are cutting edge today. Science moves on; new discoveries and new techniques have to be incorporated into packed curricula. Subjects that could once be covered adequately in a lecture or two now require whole courses. Things change - get over it.

There is, of course, a legitimate case to be made that in concentrating too much on teaching the nuts of bolts of life we lose sight of the wider context, turning out academically short-sighted graduates who are incapable of making meaningful observations in the field. This is an area where natural history museums have an important role to play, by engaging with K-12 students and feeding a fascination with the natural world before they reach university; providing a different perspective for undergraduate teaching; and supplying information and materials to support postgraduate research. Saying that natural history, as a discipline, belongs in a museum is no insult. In a crowded world of science education, it's probably the best thing that could have happened.

(PS - the title of this post, aside from capturing some of the tone of the listserve debate, was picked solely as an opportunity to highlight Blur's magnificent album of the same title. Released in 1993, it features a splendid picture of The Mallard on its cover and is (as Amazon says), "the weirdest and most endearing head-rock album since the Flaming Lips' Transmissions from the Satellite Heart." It's much better than Parklife. Download a copy and listen to it now!)

"It's Not About You"

2011-01-08T11:56:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of the dinner-party level of political and cultural analysis practised by Huffington Post, which is basically a series of random opinions offered by those who have no relevant qualifications whatsoever other than wealth and/or celebrity. There is no finer practioner of this form of cultural discourse than the site's founder, so when she decided to take aim at new media in museums I could barely contain my excitement. A self-declared "complete evangelist for new media," Arianna Huffington finds herself conflicted by the risk that social media will screw with people's "Fourth Instinct" a little known philosophical concept developed by.... Arianna Huffington.

I'm more of a First-to-Third Instincts kinda guy, so Arianna's carefully constructed arguments, involving quotes from Susan Sontag and the dude that runs USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, tended to go over my head. But in essence, her article forms part of a social media backlash, typified by Ed Rothstein's NYT piece on museum i-Phone apps in October of last year, which basically suggested that object tagging was a waste of time because the plebs that do it are all stupid (for evidence that this isn't actually true, take a look at this). In natural history museums we have our own version of this in the form of "Thomas H. Benton," a professor of English from Michigan whose vision of the ideal museum seems to have been taken from the pages of Titus Groan. What I love about all of them is the utter confidence with which they offer their expert opinions based, as far as I can tell, on the sole qualification of having visited a few museums. I travel on planes a lot, but (and call me chicken if you want) I don't feel that makes me a pilot.

Anyway, I was all fired up to go and write something along the lines of "you know nothing about this, so why don't you either 1) go and learn about it or 2) shut up." Then I found that Nina Simon had published the perfect riposte over on Museum 2.0, so I'm going to suggest that you go and read that instead.

Just Another Year

2011-01-08T11:17:00.004-05:00

So PoH makes it into a third year, to my great surprise. Events over the last 12 months have consprired to keep the number of posts down, and I've spent too much time highlighting other people's articles for my own liking. But you can't have everything.

Those of you that have read this blog for a while (and there are about two of you by my reckoning) will know that my view of the museum world tends to involves looking back at where I came from (i.e the UK) or looking around at where I am now (the USA). This year the contrast between the two has been stark.

In America, for example, we achieved the extraordinary goal of taking a national strategy for the digitization of biological collections from discussion to a $100 million (hopefully) NSF program in a mere 12 months. In truth this is the end result of years of lobbying by a host of people in the natural science collections community (especially the late Terry Yates), but my colleague Rob Guralnick from the University of Colorado deserves a particular shout-out for wrangling a very diverse (and sometimes quite fractious) cast of characters to achieve this reamarkable outcome.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic... well, I've exhausted myself blogging on this over the course of the year. Over the last decade, when I and my American colleagues have visited Britain, we've been blown away by the achievements of the UK natural history collections community and their European colleagues. Sadly, it looks like 2010 may be the year that this all came to a grinding halt.

The austerity drive being undertaken by the Cameron government has already resulted in the abolition of the Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council, a series of sweeping departmental budget cuts at a national level, and the perversion of the volunteer culture in UK museums in order to plug the gaps caused by staff losses. In the year to come, colleagues in local authority museums can look forward to their own round of funding cuts as the austerity measures begin to bite at a regional level.

In the USA, by contrast, the president has just signed into law the renewal of the IMLS for another 5 years. Before everyone starts patting themselves on the back, however, this was one of the last acts of the Democrat-led House of Representatives. Its Republican successor is unlikely to look so kindly on museums and museum collections - we've already seen what conservatives think about collection improvement, and the recent You Cut initiative puts a marker out for the fun and games we can expect over the next couple of years. And after that it may get worse.

But enough of this Debbie Downer stuff. There is one unarguable source for celebration in this cold, dark January. Primeval has returned from the TV grave! Connor and Abbie have returned from exile in the Cretaceous!! Jason Flemying has been banished to the Pliocene version of Hollywood!!! I'm still digesting the first episode, but rest assured that a full breakdown is coming in a future post. Then, if that wasn't enough, in the Fall of 2011 we will have Terra Nova. I would like to say that this show offers more prospects for bad paleontology but as its star, Jason O'Mara, was kind enough to come visit our collections a few months ago, I might only have myself to blame. Come on Jason, I'm counting on you...

Curators

2010-12-29T11:51:00.000-05:00

Check out this great article by Stan Friedman on the proliferation of "curators" outside of the traditional heritage institution world (my particular favorite is "Ryan Seacrest, pop culture curator"). Does this prove the oft-quoted dogma of the collections manager that "Any fool can be a curator"?

Get Stuffed

2010-12-28T09:13:00.000-05:00

I can understand the principle behind the recent efforts by Rajshahi University Zoology Professor, Dr Bidhan Chandra Das, to train more Bangladeshi taxidermists in order to preserve dead wildlife for use in education. But I'm not sure the exhortation to "stuff more rare animals" hits quite the right note.

Anthropology "Not Anti-Science"

2010-12-28T09:01:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks back, the New York Times reported that the American Anthropological Association had made a decision to strip the word "science" from it's long range plan. This was cast in the light of a science/anti-science struggle within AAA's membership. AAA has now issued a press release which forcefully rebuts the Times article and emphasizes that anthropology draws on research from both the sciences and humanities. This clarification of AAA's position is very welcome, and only the most churlish of readers would respond to it by saying that there's no smoke without fire...

Why We Accession

2010-12-13T16:10:00.000-05:00

At first I was puzzled by the headline to this article, entitled "Local museum retrieves some fossils at auction." Why would the Buena Vista Museum of Natural History, which is located in Bakersfield CA, have to go to auction to retrieve its own fossils? Well, of course, the fossils don't actually belong to the BVMNH - this exceptional collection of Miocene marine organisms was in fact the property of a local collector, Bob Ernst. Ernst died in 2007, leaving the fossils to his widow, Mary. Financial pressures have now forced Mrs Ernst to sell the collection. Cue much angst on the part of the Museum, which has been trying to raise funds to buy some of the specimens.

I don't know anything about the specifics of this case, but a study of the Museum's mission statement rang immediate alarm bells. According to their mission, the BVMNH is "the repository of the Bob and Mary Ernst Collection, the largest private collection of Sharktooth Hill Miocene fossils in the World." In a museum context, "repository" is a not a great word. All too often it's code for "I lend it, you pay to look after it, I get it back whenever I want."

The best approach is to accession the specimens so that they become the property of the museum. Most museums only enter into repository arrangements only when there is no other alternative - e.g. for collections that were made on Federal land - and have a legal agreement in place that sets out the expectations of the parties. These include ensuring ongoing access for researchers, providing appropriate curatorial care, and - critically - the circumstances under which specimens can be retrieved by the owner. For most Federal agreements, the museum's expectation would be that we keep the fossils in perpetuity, unless we breach our obligations of care and access.

BVMNH was co-founded by Ernst because of his concerns that Miocene fossils from Sharktooth Hill were being removed by other institutions, including the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Smithsonian. Apparently, his intention was to make sure that Bakersfield residents would be able to enjoy their local fossil heritage. It's sadly ironic that, should the fossils pass into private ownership, the only material to which they will have access are the specimens whose long-term accessibility is guaranteed by LACM, CAS, NMNH, etc. As for researchers that have based their studies on specimens from the BVMNH collections, they run the risk that the specimens cited may no longer be available for study by future generations of scholars. I doubt we've heard the last of this one....

[with thanks to Josh Ludtke for bringing this to my attention.....]

"YouCut" Bad

2010-12-12T16:34:00.002-05:00

I am writing this as a former left wing radical and card-carrying member of the Labour Party. In my opinion the whole "YouCut" episode is nothing to do with the public understanding of science and all about the toxicity of modern American politics.

It's a widely acknoweldged fact that Americans have a deep distrust of intellectuals. This is something that the Republicans have never been shy of exploiting and even Democrats have had to acknowledge. It's no accident that one of America's smartest presidents ever (William Jefferson Clinton: Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale; Rhodes Scholar, etc.) spent most of his presidency honing his best Jed Clampett impression. Sad to say, the current president may be brought low because he's smart, well-educated, and not afraid to show it.

Science is an easy target because most people don't understand it and because scientists are easy to caricature as out-of-touch with reality. Combine that with the fact that they often work on things that are a major turn-off to the Republican base - stem cell research, evolutionary biology, and climate change are a few that spring to mind - and you have a sure-fire recipe to turn research funding into another productive front in the culture wars. Politicians don't attack science because they don't understand it. They attack it because they know that other people don't.

Another issue that makes NSF an attractive target for politicians is that the destination of monies allocated to science via the agency is determined by peer review - i.e. by scientists and scientific priorities. This is anathema to most politicians, who would like to dole out big research grants through the same system of political patronage that determines most other Federal funding. Under this model, the decision as to whether a multi-million dollar research grant was given to, say, Harvard or Kansas would be determined by how much you needed the votes of the Kansas senator vs those of the senator from Massachusetts.

Of course, I'm not dewy-eyed enough to believe that political factors play no role in the award of large grants, especially and the mega-grant level, but NSF is scrupulous in its employment of peer review, to an extent not matched by all Federal agencies. The idea of all that potential pork being handed out on the say-so of a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals must drive Members of Congress batty.

Of course, the problem with taking a "negative" stance is that while it's much more fun, it doesn't really take you anywhere. So that's my challenge to the "YouCut" people. Rather than the public telling us what should be cut, why not have them tell us what should be funded. Pick your favorite proposals and then let's publish them and see what everyone thinks. No? Well that's not surprising. Because that's not the debate that you're interested in having, is it?

"YouCut" Good

2010-12-12T16:32:00.000-05:00

I'm am writing this as a member of Britain's educational elite (MA Oxon, St John's, 1988) and adopting the persona of a firm, but caring conservative in the mold of my contemporaries David Cameron (Brasneose, 1988) and Boris Johnson (Balliol, 1987). From this perspective, I think it's entirely reasonable that in these fiscally challenging time our elected representatives should ask the public to consider whether they are really getting good value for money from Federally-supported research.

To me, the issue here is one of public understanding of science. By and large, scientists have not been particularly good at explaining to the public what they are doing with all those taxpayer dollars. This becomes rapidly apparent when you begin to search the NSF database, as suggested by the YouCut program. Few of these projects feature anything like a Plain English summary of why the project is important, how it will improve people's lives, and how the money is going to be spent.

Instead, discussion of the "broader impacts" of the work are dominated by grant-speak phrases like "synergy," "cyberinfrastructure," "proactive," "leverage," and "transformational." This "verbiage" (another grant-speak term) isn't good science, nor is it even very meaningful. It's just gobbledygook. Minimally, any project worthy of public funding ought to come with an explanation, understandable to most members of the public, of why they're having to pay for it.

Many scientists will argue that their work is so complex and the U.S. public is so scientifically illiterate that such as task is impossible. To which I say "bullsh*t." Consider this explantion, one of a number that were produced by partical physicists in 1993 in response to a challege from the then U.K. Minister for Science to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question "What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?" If you can do this for sub-atomic physics, surely one of the most abstruse branches of science, then why not biology, genetics, social sciences, or any other discipline?

"YouCut" is a challenge, but it's not an unreasonable one. Rather than protest loudly that we are under attack by a bunch of know-nothings, we should embrace the opportunity of providing better access to, and understanding of, publicly-funded research.

Not the Best of Weeks

2010-12-12T16:28:00.000-05:00

It hasn't been the greatest of weeks for science in the U.S.A. First, serious concerns began to emerge about the lab work behind the discovery of an arsenic-digesting bacterium, which was announced with great fanfare by NASA a week previously. My friend and colleague Carl Zimmer has produced a great synposis of these issues for Slate, which you can read here.

What's particularly saddening is that, according to Carl, his article is already being picked up by Tea Party bloggers and websites, who are using it to add to the growing clamour from the Right for tighter controls on Federal funding of science, more skepticism about climate change research, and you name it. This is an unfortunate time for a high profile case that casts doubt on scientific practice and procedures to hit the news.

Over at the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer has been doing a great job of undermining my confidence in science by publishing an excellent article on the Decline Effect, a phenomenon by which repeated re-testing of apparently rock-solid scientific results results in their becoming less, rather than more convincing with time. The conclusion the article comes to is that it may be next-to-impossible to prove anything experimentally. Sigh.

Which raises the question of why we don't just do like the anthropologists and abandon science altogether. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the American Anthropological Association has been thrown into turmoil by a decision at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan. "Why" you might ask? Well this highly entertaining blog post by Alice Dreger gives some background, but essentially the take home message is that the Right has no monopoly on wingnuts.

Meanwhile I had promised a more detailed follow-up to the whole "YouCut" assault on NSF, but when I came to consider it in detail I realized that I was so schizoid on this subject that I would have to right two posts from diametrically opposed positions. So that's what I did. If you want a sensible analysis of the situation, this is a very good article from USA today. If, on the other hand, you want to know what I think, read on......

Awesome

2010-12-11T11:47:00.000-05:00

Man, I love lolcatz. Who doesn't?

One Down

2010-12-11T11:44:00.000-05:00

The first of the three grant proposals I had on my plate was submitted yesterday - congratulations to all the people who put in a ton of work on this. Fortunately, my part was a fairly small one. However, that still leaves two to go. Next deadline, December 31st. Ugh.

One knock-on effect of all the activity, grant or otherwise, this year is that the number of posts on PoH will be less than last year. Nonetheless, I've set myself the goal of hitting 100 by the end of December. Of course, there'll be no sacrificing quality; you won't catch me publishing worthless stuff just to get the numbers up. And that's a cast-iron commitment.

Wisdom of the Crowd

2010-12-07T23:04:00.000-05:00

This topic deserves a lengthier post - and rest assured, reader, one is coming - but for now, a quick heads up about the Republicans' "YouCut" initiative, which allows the public to select Federally-funded projects that they believe should be cut as worthless. This week they were taking aim at NSF, encouraging citizens to search NSF's awards database for projects they felt were wasteful and then send the grant numbers to YouCut. Note that one of the key words they suggest to help narrow the search is "museum." Sigh. Of course, this isn't the first time that NSF support of museums has been criticized - you may recall this case from earlier in the year. But that was just the numb-nuts at Fox News; this time it's people that actually control funding allocations. There are good reasons for using tax payer dollars to support science in museums and you can rest assured that SPNHC, NSCA, AIBS and a bunch of other organizations will be making that case over the next couple of years. It's not going to be an easy ride... more on that later.

Eggs

2010-12-07T22:52:00.000-05:00

Ah, the noble science of oology, useless for just about anything except Scrabble (and even then it won't net you many points). To have a collection of birds eggs these days is about one stage up from being found in possession of... well, I'll leave that to your imagination. Anyway, apparently I missed this court case back in March, but it's already having implications for natural history collections. A post on the NatSCA listserve this week alerted recipients to the availability of an historic collection of shells. The owner was selling the antique cabinet that housed the shells, but couldn't find an auctioneer who would take the collection itself for fear of possible prosecution. While I'm no great fan of the commercial market for natural history specimens, one has to wonder how many UK natural history collections will just get dumped in the future because of publicity about this prosecution.

"James Bond"... with a flute

2010-11-27T23:54:00.001-05:00

Update on the Great Tring Bird Robbery, courtesy of the Daily Mail. It seems that the theft was carried out by Edwin Rist, a 22 year-old American flautist and champion fly-tyer studying at the Royal Academy of Music, who conceived the whole escapade as a "James Bond" fantasy. In the words of his lawyer, "he did not use exotic tools to get in, in fact he smashed a window. He didn't even take a torch, and has described going around trying to get light off his phone. It was a very amateur burglary."

The lesson for us collections types lies in the reconnaisance that Rist was able to carry out - posing as an ornithology student from the University of Oxford, he gained access to the collection, checking out their holdings in the catalog, and under the guise of taking photographs of specimens was able to photograph the alleyways and corridors that he would use to get access during his break-in. Without seeming clever after the event, this is why you should always ask for references for students and do a quick background check before letting any visitors in (there's this thing called "Google" that you may have heard of).

Beyond that, I have a lot of sympathy with the staff at NHM. The reality is that most museums, especially the big ones, have nowhere near enough staff to constantly monitor the behavior of visitors while they're in the collections. I remember occasional discussions with the General Counsel at a previous employer on the subject of collection security; his opinion was that we allowed "far too many" people access to the collections. Obviously I disagreed with that, not least because while it's cheaper to try and deal with the problem of theft by choking off access, it does nothing for our fundamental mission of ensuring the utility of the collections. Ultimately you have to pony up for the staff or accept the occasional losses; locking the doors in the face of users isn't an option.

Night (and Day) at the Museum

2010-11-26T17:20:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the clever folk at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry who came up with the idea of a competition where the prize was the opportunity to spend a month living in the Museum. Yes, really living there. Like you can't leave, except for one day a week. This would be my vision of Hell, but they actually got 1,500 applicants. Apparently the five finalists went through psychological screening, which I guarantee means that they are better adjusted than the average museum employee. Anyway, the lucky winner was Kate McGroarty, a 24 year-old theater graduate, and you can read all about her adventures here. And on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a blog. Good thing they're not flogging the Web 2.0 aspects to death, eh?

Stripy

2010-11-26T17:03:00.001-05:00

Heard the one about the guy who found a thylacine pelt at a garage sale? The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Bill Warren of Fallbrook CA purchased the skin for $5.00 and is now looking forward to cashing in big time. Unfortunately for Bill, it's also possible that his bargain is actually the hide of an African zebra duiker. For a surprisingly thoughtful analysis of the evidence, see here. Be warned - I say "suprisingly" because the author of this analysis also believes in Bigfoot. In Texas.

Awe Inspiring

2010-11-23T20:15:00.004-05:00

A friend who shall remain nameless has sent me a truly titanic work of literature, entitled Tempting the Fire, by Sydney Croft. I'm not entirely sure what genre you'd put it in - torrid romance, perhaps. It combines - wait for it - cryptozoology and porn. It's so bad that I'm surprised it hasn't created a singularity of crapness and eaten my bookshelf. I haven't actually been able to bring myself to read it yet, but the blurb on the back cover promises delights beyond mortal understanding.

Deep in the Brazilian Rainforest, a team of Navy SEALS has been nearly wiped out. Note the "nearly" - Navy SEALS are so bodacious that they never get totally wiped out, even by "a mythical monstrosity with a taste for human blood." Plot spoiler: it's the Chupacabra! Anyway, the Federal government does what it always does in these situations - it dispatches a pair of hot chicks to investigate.

"Sela is an expert on cryptozoology..."

OK, you've lost me right there. She's a woman, she's hot, and she's interested in cryptozoology? Yeah, right.

"Sela is an expert on cryptozoology with a sideline skill that could prove invaluable." Making fire by rubbing sticks together? Fluent speaker of Yanomami? No.

"When she makes love to a man, she ingulfs his innermost thoughts."

Hmmm, not what I would have thought of at first, but I guess it might come in handy. Anyway, I for one can't wait to find out how Sela and her pal fare in "this sweat-drenched realm of danger and deception," since my experience of fieldwork in tropical rainforests suggests that passion usually falters in the face of the intractable fungal infections that attack one's groin from day one. Oops, TMI.

The Preservation of Evil

2010-11-20T14:10:00.010-05:00

Growing up Jewish in 1950s Queens, Mark Jacobson used to wonder why the tough Italian kids referred to him and his friends as "lampshades." You can put that down to being a kid, and to protective parenting. There are few people today who are unaware that among the miriad of horrors inflicted by the Nazis during the Holocaust, there was the manufacture of items from the remains of their victims; gold from fillings, hair for blankets, and - notoriously - lampshades from skin. The lampshade story is a persistent one. The only problem is that, other than testimony from survivors and a 3 second film clip taken after the liberation of Buchenwald, there is no real evidence for such lampshades. Unless you count the one that turned up, unsolicited, at Jacobson's apartment in 2006.

The lampshade forms the core of an extraordinary book of the same name, written by Jacobson and published earlier this year. I highly recomend it as a fascinating, if deeply unsettling read, but if you want the potted version you can take a look at this piece in The Independent. One of the most interesting parts of the story involves Jacobson's attempt to donate the lampshade to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. where he hits a brick wall, in the form of Diane Saltzman, the Museum's head of collections. As far as Saltzmann is concerned, the skin lampshades are a myth. Her rationale is an interesting one, and one that's worth unpacking if you, like me, happen to work in a museum. It relates to the two touchstones of accessioning; provenance and relevance.

Jacobsen believed that he had three pieces of evidence that demonstrated that the lampshade may be a product of the Holocaust. First, DNA tests showed that the material of the shade was of human origin. Then there was the appearance of the solder used on the lampshade frame, which the original buyer had noticed was similar to that seen in German-made guitars. Finally there was the assertion of the seller, a former graveyard thief from New Orleans, that the lampshade was made from "the skin of Jews." Would you accept that as adequate provenance? No, of course you wouldn't, and neither did Saltzman. She listed some of the things Jacobson should also have done; tested the age of the thread holding the lampshade panels together, the metal of the frame itself. By Jacobson's own admission the preservation of DNA was insufficient to prove ethnicity. And there was no information as to how the lampshade ended up in New Orleans, where a friend found it for sale.

But, as Saltzman went on to explain, even if the object had watertight provenance, even if you could prove that it was made from a Buchenwald prisoner ca. 1943, that wouldn't be enough. The Museum's educational mission relates to the Holocaust, and the making of lampshades, horrific though it might be, wasn't part of the machinery of the Holocaust. If anything it's an example of individual pyschopathy, rather than the institutional psychopathy that makes the Holocaust so unique. There's even an argument, proposed by Saltzman and expanded upon in a later interview with Michael Berenbaum, the Museum's project director from 1988 to 1997, that these kind of objects are a distraction; as Berenbaum says "they are a form of pornography, because people focus on them to the exclusion of everything else." Furthermore, they can't be displayed because of the strong sentiment felt by many people, and critically by many Holocaust survivors, that showing the objects is disrespectful to the victims.

So no provenance, and no relevance to the institution's mission. That should be more than enough to give a thumbs-down to accessioning. But that still leaves the fundamental question, which Jacobson asks and Saltzman declines to answer - what do I do with this thing? Reading the book, I found myself questioning my own attitudes. Before I was a paleontologist, I worked in mammal and general zoology collections, both of which frequently contain human remains. I vividly remember fishing in a tank full of flayed animal carcasses, my arm submerged to the shoulder in almost opaque ethanol, trying to find a pickled human baby that had been "misfiled." My feeling when I finally managed to identify an infant foot among all the various appendages was one of relief at being able to get my arm out of the tank, rather than horror at what I had pulled up from the depths.

But there was something about the lampshade that made my skin crawl. Surely this thing had no place in a museum? I realized that I was beginning to get some understanding of what indigenous peoples feel when they see human remains in museum collections. For someone who spends his life trying to preserve items, the sense that this was an item that should probably be destroyed was an uncomfortable one.

Hot off the Press

2010-11-20T13:31:00.000-05:00

For those of you that have been following this story for a while, the outcome will probably be no surprise....

Another Week of Grant Madness

2010-11-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

Turning out to be a very poor month for PoH posts - sorry loyal reader(s). Anyway, there was some good news; the BBC reported that a 22 year old American citizen had been arrested for the theft of 299 bird skins from the ornithology collections of the Natural History Museum last year. You may recall from this 2009 MFW post that there was concern that the skins would be destroyed and the feathers sold off to fly-tying enthusiasts. Fortunately, police report that the majority of the skins were recovered intact. The guy is due in court next week; assuming he doesn't plead guilty, we may have to wait a while to hear how and why he did it.

No, I'm Not Dead.....

2010-11-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

.... just tied up with grant deadlines. Ugh. Anyway, one good solution to having no time to write one's own blog posts is to link to other people's posts that I've enjoyed. With this in mind, check out this great post from New Light on Old Bones, and the follow-up post, which look at the nature of "real" in natural history museums. Should be required reading for any Bentonites out there. And if nothing else, you'll want to watch the 1932 video of a tiger fighting a python.

Banged Up

2010-10-31T22:46:00.002-04:00

In our quest to reach out to new audiences and encourage citizen science participation, this is one option that museums haven't yet considered. But maybe we should....

See, I'm Not Crazy!

2010-10-25T08:46:00.001-04:00

For those of you who think I'm getting a bit monomaniacal on the subject of the UK government's austerity measures, the New York Times agrees with me! OK, they didn't literally agree with me, but we are of one mind, the Times and I.

Ouch. Again.

2010-10-23T09:45:00.001-04:00

Meanwhile, over in "that country where everything sucks" (to quote Beavis and Butthead) Chancellor George Osborn finally announced his Comprehensive Spending Review, aimed at taking £80 billion out of the public sector budget over the next four years. You can read the whole thing here, if you want, although it doesn't make pleasant reading. Nick Clegg (remember him?) says that everyone's making a big fuss over nothing, because all that's happened is that public spending as a proportion of the economy in 2014-15 will be back where it was in 2006-7. It should be obvious to many people why this is a facile argument, but BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders spells it out very well in this blog post. The bottom line is that these are the largest cuts in public spending for 50 years and by the time we reach 2015, about 1 in 12 civil service jobs will have gone. Overall, estimates of public sector job losses are around the 600,000 mark.

What does this mean for museums? As we've already seen, there's been one early casualty in the form of the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), which was abolished in the "Bonfire of the Quangos." That means that there is now no single body responsible for museums in the UK and the MLA's programs will devolve back to various Government departments like Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS). Apparently duplication of function across different departments is more efficient - go figure. The problem, of course, is that these departments have also had their budgets slashed. DCMS has lost 40% of its admin budget and has to reduce costs by £1.1 billion by 2014-15. One of the points highlighted in many reports is that despite these cuts, free entry to museums and galleries will remain. This is great in principal, but all that means is that the cuts will be applied where the public can't see them - the "business as usual" model beloved by many museum administrators. Want to bet on not seeing reductions in the level of collections care over the next 5 years? No, neither would I.

Some people of an optimistic bent will be cheered by news that the UK science budget has not been cut. Instead it's been frozen for four years, which is actually a real terms cut of around 10%, but from the amount of celebrating from British scientists you'd think they didn't teach math in British universities these days. Before any of you museum-based scientists get too happy about this, however, I would caution that Tories don't think what you do is science - they see it as more like a hobby. In their view, science is all about wealth creation. Museum research programs do contribute to the economic well-being of the nation in many ways, but these are mostly indirect. Conservatives' interest in scientific research are limited to two big questions: "Can you sell it?" and "For how much?"

By now, US readers will have long since tuned out, but if there are any of you left I would urge you, as I often do, to take notice of what is happening in the UK. With mid-term elections approaching, you are faced with a fundamental choice - a party that believes in public spending and another that doesn't. Take a long, hard look at Britain. This is what happens when a party that dislikes the public sector gets into power, and it's not pretty. And Cameron, Osborn, and that guy from the midget party no-one cares about anymore, are raging Trotskyites by comparison with their U.S. equivalents. You have been warned....

[BTW, for the lighter side of the budget cuts, my favorite are the two £5 billion aircraft carriers that are being paid for, in part, by cutting the planes that are supposed to fly from them. More here]

Three Simple Truths

2010-10-23T08:43:00.001-04:00

Those of you with half-decent memories will recall that earlier this year I blogged on the parlous state of the U.S. Federal scientific collections, highlighted in a series of uncomplementary reports issued over the past few years. I'm pleased to report that the Government has now acted, in the form of a new policy for scientific collections issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which you can read here. It's not a long document, but it says three very important things:

1) It's not appropriate for Federal agencies to appropriate money designated for collection support and spend it on research.

2) Different collection holding agencies need to pool their efforts to develop consistent standards and best practices for collections care.

3) These collections belong to the American people and they need to be made accessible. This means investing in on-line collections access.

You'll notice that these are three topics that PoH often bangs on about. Does this mean I have a direct line to the White House? Hah - I wish! Wouldn't have an office with no windows if I did, that's for certain. However, what it does show is that these are simple, commonsense measures for the care of collections that are so obvious that even the Federal Government recognizes them. So how come so many non-Federal institutions don't?

Registrars....

2010-10-22T19:48:00.002-04:00

This was sent to me from the AAM Registrars listserve last week and amply demonstrates why registrars are... special:

We’ve found a bottle rocket in our archives. Cursory research indicates that bottle rockets normally contain black powder along with other things. I checked the listserv archives but everything I’m finding seems to relate to stores of black powder. In this case, the powder is contained in a small firework, and that firework is part of another object, so we’d prefer not to discard it…

at which point, I couldn't read any more.

Work vs Work Study

2010-10-10T18:54:00.001-04:00

Laying off 56 workers is, while regrettable, not an unusual state of affairs in these straitened times. But replacing them with work-study students, as the Indianapolis Museum of Art did? That's the sort of thing that gets you into trouble with the Feds, because the students in question were supported by Federal funds. Read more here - one suspects this may not be the last of these cases to hit the papers.

The Sound of Silence

2010-10-03T15:02:00.001-04:00

In previous posts, I've documented the emergence of a national strategy for the digitization of the US biological collections and the creation of a new NSF programs, Advances in the Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC), as a first step in the realization of this strategy. If you haven't been following this and want to know more, just click on the word "digitization" in the tag cloud on the right hand side of this blog. I would also urge you to go take a look at the ADBC Community Blog.

One of the things that's struck many of us working on the digitization project is how little response we've had from the wider collection management community. During the initial process of creating the strategy, there was quite a bit of feedback from curators and researchers, and a little from collection managers. But since then, despite the emergence of more than $10 million from NSF to kick-start the initiative, there has been little in the way of further commentary. I find this quite worrying.

To explain why, I need to go back to the early 1990s and an initiative on taxonomy and systematics that was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). It was aimed at reversing the decline in taxonomic research in the UK; the long-term success of this initiative can be judged by the fact that there is yet another review of UK taxonomy going on at the moment with more-or-less the same objectives.

There were various reasons why the first initiative didn't work - lack of money was a key problem - but to my mind, one of its most striking features was that very few practising taxonomists or systematists were involved in its creation. Instead, the loudest voices were from the users of systematic research, especially researchers who used the so-called "comparative method" to study the evolution of life history strategies, host-parasite relationships, etc.

For these researchers, a major source of frustration was the lack of accurate phylogenetic trees to describe the interrelationships of the groups that they studied. They attributed this to a lack of trained taxonomists working on these groups, and went from there to making the case that the UK needed more taxonomists. A good thing, one might think. And so it was, as far as it went.

The problem was that this lack of taxonomists was just the outward sign of a much bigger and more complex set of underlying problems; these included the steady erosion of organismal biology in UK undergraduate degree programs, a lack of funding for museum collections, reductions in museum staffing at all levels (not just researchers), and especially a lack of permanent positions in universities and museums; it can take literally decades to acquire expertise in the taxonomy of some groups.

The researcher advocates of the taxonomy iniative were, by and large, ignorant of these issues. The taxonomists weren't. They were also alienated by some of comments made by promoters of the new program, who argued that, for example, funding should only be provided to do research on groups whose systematics are poorly understood. It may be a good way to use limited funds, but it's unlikely to win friends in an academic community that contains many vertebrate workers.

Another issue was hyperbole. The advocates of the program argued that this was a grand scheme for the benefit of humanity - to catalog all the species on the planet and uncover the one "true" phylogenetic tree that links them all. Talk like that tends to irritate practising taxonomists, who are well aware that species boundaries are notoriously fluid (even in relatively well-studied groups like mammals and birds) and that trees change every time new data emerges.

The end result of all of this was that the community that should have coalesced around the new initiative - a multidisciplinary collaboration between taxonomists, collection managers, biologists, conservationists, and the wider academic world; a community that could have perhaps leveraged more funding than the relatively modest amounts available to NERC - never formed. In time, the comparative method biologists moved on to other problems and the taxonomy initiative fizzled out after five years.

By now, you'll probably have seen where I'm going with this. The national collections digitization strategy is another program with ambitious objectives, albeit better-funded. It is being pushed strongly by the potential users of the newly-captured data. But it does not seem to have captured the imagination, energy, or enthusiasm of the people that actually work on collections. So do we have a problem?

At one level, I'd say no. The digitization iniative has the enthusiastic support of SPNHC, the society representing collections care professionals. SPNHC has pledged to work with applicants for funding under ADBC to help build collaborations with the collection management community and tackle some of the tricky practical issues with capturing large volumes of specimen data in a relatively short period of time. We also have at our disposal a raft of community-support tools - blogs, wikis, etc - that can disseminate information and feed back comments from stakeholders. If they choose to use them.

And this is where the problem comes in. Speaking bluntly, as one collection manager to others, we seem to have a problem historically in responding positively to change in our work and work practices. Our tendency is to assume that no-one understands the job we do; no-one consults with us; and no-one listens to what we say. In the past, sadly, that may have been so. But now, with this initiative, we're being listened to. The problem is, many of us are choosing to say nothing.

Maybe you're keeping your powder dry. Maybe you think that digitization is a distraction from the serious business of caring for collections. Maybe you think it's not enough money, or you suspect that the money that is available won't be coming to you. If so, then the answer is to get engaged. Comment on this blog. Better still, comment on the ADBC blog. Lobby SPNHC. Lobby your discipline-based societies - SVP, ASM, AOU, ASIH.... Do something.

For years, we as a profession have been arguing that what we do is important and that the collections we care for are a critical scientific resource that is worth protecting. Now, finally, we're being listened to. If we act strategically - if we see ADBC as the beginning and work as a community to build on it and leverage more support - then we have the potential to unlock enormous resources in support of our collections. If we stay silent, then I wonder if we'll ever be listened to again.

O. M. G.

2010-10-01T20:08:00.002-04:00

I've always felt ashamed of being an acrachnophobe, but having just finished reading a piece on the Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria nigriventer) I feel that all my fears may have been justified. Not only is its bite excruciatingly painful, but the venom has also been found to cause increased levels of nitric oxide. What does that do? Well, if you're a dude, it can give you an involuntary erection that is both painful and long-lasting. Ouchy! However, unpleasant though this erection might be, you'd better enjoy it while you can because it might be your last; the venom can also leave you impotent. By grateful that humans are big animals. Lab mice injected with Phoneutria venom "experienced intense penile erections before succumbing to the toxin." That is a bad way to go.

I've never encountered a Brazilian wandering spider, thank God, but I already hate them. I plan on contacting Jeff MacMahan to suggest that the whole genus be wiped from the face of the planet for causing intolerable suffering to other species. And especially the males of other species.

Life During Wartime

2010-09-28T16:18:00.002-04:00

While we're talking about museums at war, today's Daily Telegraph has a great article on the travails of London's Natural History Museum during WWII. It's a timely reminder when we're worrying about the state of our museums and their collections that there are worse things than having your staff and funding cut....

Panda-monium

2010-09-22T19:23:00.001-04:00

Following on from the previous post, it seems that Hermann's Panda is not the least of the Berlin's Panda-related problems. See here for the sad story of Yan Yan, stuck in diplomatic limbo in the Museum's freezer. PS - this was not my pun, but it's been a long day and I'm feeling lazy.

Pickled

2010-09-22T19:12:00.002-04:00

Fans of fluid-preserved specimens need to get themselves over to Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde, which has just celebrated the restoration of its East Wing (destroyed by Allied bombing during WWII) by exhibiting a selection of the nearly 276,000 jars of specimens that are housed in the new storage facility. If you think that number's impressive, consider that according to the collection's curator, Peter Bartsch, they only broke six jars during the move to the new building. Also on display in the exhibit, which celebrates the Museum's 200th Anniversary, is a giant panda stuffed by Hermann Göring. According to the exhibit curator, Prof. Dr. Ferdinand Damaschun, "We don’t know how it came into the collection, but we put it in the exhibition to show the difficulties the museum has had during different eras.” I suspect that deciding what to do with a panda that has been offered to you by Göring, while living in 1930s Germany, is the sort of accessioning conundrum that most of us will not have to face in our professional lifetimes. The exhibit is open from September 14 through February 28, 2011, and you can read more about it in Spiegel International.

Moo

2010-09-21T15:51:00.001-04:00

In the UK today, the Daily Telegraph reports that ITV News was embarrassed when reports of a dead polar bear washed up on a Cornish beach turned out to be a dead cow with its hide bleached white by exposure to sea water. American readers will recall the similar incident of the "Montauk Monster," a waterlogged raccoon corpse from Long Island that got far too many people who should have known better very exercised a couple of years ago. Fortunately, there was no cryptozoologist around when the "bear" was discovered; otherwise we would now be inundated with an ever-growing list of candidates culled from the pages of their "Big Book of Prehistoric Life."

The Dumbest Thing I Ever Read

2010-09-20T16:11:00.001-04:00

Kudos to Jeff McMahan, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and a visiting research collaborator at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, for writing the dumbest essay I ever read, and double-kudos to the New York Times for publishing it. I actually fell off my chair laughing. McMahan's contention is that we should engineer the selective extinction of all carnivores on Earth on the basis that they cause suffering to other animals. I don't know where to start with this, so I'm not even going to try, except to say that if you were ever looking for proof of why one should hesitate before going into press on a subject one knows nothing about, this is it. Meanwhile, I am sitting down to write an opinion piece on Schopenhauer, confident that the Times will publish it.

[PS, I wanted to comment on the piece, but I noted that after 270-odd comments along the lines of "what the f*@k?" the Times has disabled the comment function]

Intolerance

2010-09-18T13:56:00.001-04:00

The problem with having a spectacular collection of fossils is that when it comes time to build your exhibit, there are some hard decisions to be made about what to leave in and what to take out. By the end of our planning process for the Cenozoic Hall, we had several hundred specimens in addition to those that are already in the gallery. Clearly something has to give.

One of the wonders of living in a digital world is the ability to explore whether or not things will fit into a space without actually having to do it in the real world. This is what my colleague, Laura Friedman, has been doing over the past few weeks, generating an entire portfolio of floor-plans. She's quick to point out that these are not actually designs for the gallery; we haven't reached that point yet. This is just an exercise in space planning.

Once we started to look at the floor-plans, it became very apparent that our new hall was in danger of getting crowded. As I've discussed in previous posts, there are some very large specimens that need to be included. We'd like to remove these from behind glass, which means that we have to allow sufficient around the specimen so that little Billy (or, more likely, little Billy's idiot father) can't lean over and touch\grab\pull it. We have to arrange the layout of the gallery so that there are no cul-de-sacs to trap the Billy family. And there has to be enough room to accommodate not just individual visitors and families, but also student groups, classes, and functions.

To make the optimum floor layout work, it was clear that we'd need to remove at least one big mount. Some, like the brontothere and mastodon, are too critical to the design of the hall to be removed. Others, such as the sabertooth cat and the giant ground sloth (complete with skin and hair!) are too cool. But I'd already picked my target and was prepared to argue forcefully for its removal. It was the giant deer.

The giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus) may be better known to you as the Irish elk, one of those typical paleontological misnomers, since it is neither an elk, nor unique to Ireland. The Finish paleomammalogist Björn Kurtén tried to get around this by referring to the giant deer as "shelk" (if you're interested in the reasoning behind this, which has more than a whiff of cryptozoology about it, you can read more here) but this has never really caught on. It lived in Eurasia during the Pleistocene and the last ones died out around 8,000 years ago.

So, what's so special about the giant deer? Well... er.... it's a really big deer. It stood a little under 7 feet tall at the shoulder. It's not actually the biggest deer that ever lived; there are modern Alaskan moose that reach that size. But - and this is what rings most people's bell, as far Megaloceros is concerned - it had super-sized antlers. They can span up to 12 feet from tip to tip and weigh over 80lbs. The Peabody's specimen is a bit smaller than this, more like 9 feet across, but it's still very striking.

As anyone who's ever visited a Scottish Highlands hotel (or, for that matter, a bar in backwoods Montana) will know, people do love a big rack. Of antlers. OK, that was a cheap double entendre but, honestly, I find it very difficult to get excited by Megaloceros. Even when people make up interesting stories about it - they died out because their big antlers got caught in trees! there are references to them in the Song of the Nibelungen! - they almost invariably turn out to be wrong. The coolest thing I ever read about them was that those big antlers sucked so much calcium out of the deer's body when growing that their skeletons developed osteoporosis, and I'm sure someone will come along and prove that to be false as well. Basically giant deer are not interesting.

Also, they are as common as cow poop in Texas. During the 19th Century, when peat was a popular fuel in the more potato-friendly parts of Europe, giant deer skeletons were turned up by the cart load in the bogs. There are very few natural history museums that don't have at least one skull with antlers. They show up in local history societies, rural life museums, and on the walls of baronial halls. The giant deer at the Warwick Museum (UK) even has its own Twitter account; if that isn't proof of mundanity, I don't know what is.

Unfortunately, I seem to be in a minority of two (my fellow mammalogist Eric Sargis agrees with me, God bless him) as far as our project committee is concerned. My suggestion that we removed the head from the skeleton and hang it on the wall was received with the sort of shocked silence I'd get if I said O.C. Marsh was an over-rated bald blow-hard (and of course I don't believe that, readers!). After trying to argue my case it was suggested to me, in a pitying tone of voice, that I was developing a "thing" about the giant deer.

In the end, we decided that we would survey visitors to see what specimens they liked. So if you happen to be visiting the Peabody in the next few weeks and someone asks you what your favorite specimen is, be sure and answer loud and clear "the giant deer!" Or don't. I really don't care.

Field Museum Faces More Cuts

2010-09-17T16:54:00.000-04:00

In yet another piece of lousy news, the Field Museum has announced a further round of job cuts due to the ongoing economic downturn. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Museum intends to shed almost 10% of its staff - 50 people - through early retirements and buyout incentives. That means that staffing at the Museum will have dropped by aropund 20% since 2007. Spokeswoman Nancy O’Shea says the job cuts “are not going to affect the visitor experience.” Phew - so that's OK then

(see here for the background to my sarcasm).

New & Improved

2010-09-15T13:44:00.002-04:00

To make life easier for those of you who are regular followers of this site (and yes, I know there are at least two of you. I think) I've tagged all of the last year's worth of posts to improve searchability. If you take a look at the tag cloud on the right hand side, you'll find you now have some terms to filter posts with. Never again will you need to trawl back through the last two years in search of one of my trademark rants about Thomas Benton. I now have an app for that.

One of the spin-offs of using a cloud is that my pet peeves and obssessions are quickly evident. "Museum," "collections," and "paleontology," are all to be expected. But who knew I was so fixated on "funding?" Well, maybe you did, but it was a revelation to me.

BTW, if none of this is making any sense to you then you're probably still reading PoH as notes via my Facebook page. Stop it! Click the "original post" link and start following the blog itself. If nothing else, it looks nicer.

Decisions, Decisions

2010-09-11T17:55:00.003-04:00

When I last wrote about our planning for the Fossil Hall rennovations, we were about to go into the collections in search of display-worthy material for the Cenozoic hall. The process of selecting specimens is not always straightforward, even in a relatively large collection like that of the Peabody. On the one hand, you want to select specimens that illustrate the story that you're telling. On the other hand, you also want to display the best of what you have, regardless of whether it fits the story. And in the case of our project there is, like some freakish mutant child, a third hand - the Zallinger mural.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of our aims in redesigning the fossil halls was to place the spectacular murals of Rudy Zallinger in the context of present-day science. So as far as possible, we've tried to include specimens of animals and plants that are shown in the murals. In the Cenozoic hall, this presents us with a couple of problems. First, "The Age of Mammals" mural is solidly North American - we do have exceptional collections of North American fossil mammals, but we also have outstanding specimens from South America (see my earlier post on these) and from the Fayum Basin of Egypt - there is no way that we are not displaying our stunning, yard-long skull of the extinct whale Basilosaurus just because it's not in the mural.

The second problem is that sometimes the species that Rudi chose to illustrate in the murals are not represented in our collections by display-worthy specimens. Having hunted high and low through the collection for a decent specimen of Tetraclaenodon, a primitive ungulate from the Paleocene, I can testify to this. The best we had was some fragments of lower jaws, isolated teeth, and random limb bones. However, we have excellent specimens of its close relative, Phenacodus. If we include Phenacodus instead of Tetraclaenodon, is that OK? Well, as it happens it is, because Phenacodus is also in the mural. But there are plenty of cases, such as the early primate Pelycodus, we have only teeth and the alternatives (e.g. the lemur-like Notharctos) are not in the mural. What do we do then?

The answer, of course, is we chill out. We don't have to have all the animals from the mural in the gallery, and neither to we have to only use animals from the mural to tell the story. The rich, subtropical coastline of the Eocene Tethys Ocean, preserved in the desert sediments of the Fayum Basin, provides us with just as powerful image of the hothouse Earth as the rainforests of Eocene Utah and Wyoming. And why should we worry about the absence of a skeleton of the early perissodactyl Hyracotherium in our collection when we have one from its close relative Orohippus? The fact that this Orohippus is as much plaster as it is real bone is a problem, but one that we'll address if and when we remount it for exhibit.

Nonetheless, each of these choices needs to be carefully weighed and discussed between the designer, the exhibit planner, and me. The end result was a list of several hundred fossils, and accompanying photos (some of which I've included here) loosely divided between the three climate periods that I discussed in an earlier post. The challenge then, is to find out whether we could fit all of these into the Hall and still have room for visitors to circulate. Plus, when they circulate through the gallery, they need to do so in such a way that we get our story of across. I'll talk more about this in a future post.

Good News

2010-09-11T12:21:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to the Humboldt State University Natural History Museum, which has managed to secure enough grant and donor funding to reopen to the public, after having to close a year ago in response to budget cuts by HSU. You can read more about this in an article from last Thursday's Arcata Eye. Those of us in university museums would do well to note the comments of HSU Provost Robert Snyder. Praising Humboldt State Professor Jeffrey White and his team, Snyder noted that they derserved special thanks “not only for the fresh grant funding they secured, but also for reinforcing the Museum’s crucial links to our academic programs in math and science." Now more than ever, we need to stay relevant to our parent institutions' mission and keep banging out those grant applications.

Back to the Future

2010-09-05T15:31:00.002-04:00

I was greatly depressed to read an article by Rob Sharp in last week's Independent, which discussed the potential impacts of a proposed 25% cut in government spending on research that forms part of the UK government's package of austerity measures. Strangely enough, however, it wasn't the cuts themselves that depressed me - after the events of the past few months, I'm pretty much burnt out on the subject of the Tories and their never-ending assault on public spending. No, what depressed me was Sharp's argument that the cuts would harm the competitiveness of the UK, by choking-off potentially valuable inventions.

I had a ringside seat the last time a Conservative government tried to overhaul research funding. This was back in 1993, when I was working for the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). As a result of the Government's plans, SERC and the other research councils were broken up and repurposed as "mission-oriented" agencies whose remit was to fund research that would lead to "wealth generation." In other words, we were to give grants to people whose research might ultimately lead to commercial products. Of course, this was a dumb idea; we spent a lot of time talking to industry about what sort of research they thought we should be funding and the answer was unanimous - what they wanted us to fund was "blue skies" research - the sort of work that no company could justify doing in their in-house labs.

The problem in 1993, and what we're seeing again in 2010, is a fundamental misunderstanding of why governments should sponsor research. Spending taxpayer pounds (or dollars) in order to generate "innovation," which Sharp seems to think this is all about, is a waste of money because innovation is so unpredictable - most academic research does not lead to marketable inventions and so there is a negligible return on the amount invested. Focusing on products is unhelpful, because it suggests that research that does not generate a product has failed, or is unworthy of support. Obviously paleontology falls into this category, but so does particle physics, astrophysics, and a host of other disciplines that help us to understand natural processes. This is not to say that they don't have "real world" applications - much of our ability to model the effects of climate change, for example, is based on paleontological data. But they won't let you sell a cloaking device, a hovercar, or a jet pack.

I may be showing my socialist roots here, but I think governments should support research because they have a responsibility to maintain the intellectual health of their country. This may seem like an amorphous concept, but ultimately it determines the standard of education that citizens receive; the accuracy of the information that's available to them; the quality of the life choices that they make; and, yes, the economic health of the nation. From the perspective of history, the size of a country's research base dictates the extent to which it can contribute to the ever-growing global corpus of knowledge. This is the sort of national pride issue that any government should be able to understand, not least the one whose country has given the world Newton, Faraday, Darwin, and Hawking to name but a few.

Government research funding comes from taxation. People don't like paying taxes because they don't have a lot of money (although it's one of life's paradoxes that the people who like taxes the least are often those most able to afford them), they're worried about losing their job at the Piggly Wiggly, and they don't see why someone should take their money and spend it on something that doesn't directly benefit them. Understandable though this may be, the world turns on bigger issues than these. Focusing on "usefulness" may help assuage angry taxpayers, but it's no basis for making policy decisions.

8-Track Frame of Mind

2010-08-28T23:59:00.005-04:00

Readers who access this blog via my Facebook page will already have lost patience with my new-found obsession with 8-track audio, which came about when I purchased an Electrophonic 8-track player (with quad amp and AM/FM receiver!) for $2.00 at a church jumble sale. In the words of one of my friends "8-tracks were an immediate object of derision when they came out. I'm sorry. They're not even bad enough to be cool." Even those who less dismissive are puzzled as to why, for example, I would make a 5 hour round-trip to Boston today to visit In Your Ear Records (a truly awesome place, BTW) in order to rummage through boxes of dusty 8-track cartridges in search of something that will actually play. So, although it's really no-one else's business, I will endeavour to explain.

As a paleontologist, I spend a lot of time dealing with extinct things. As a curator, I spend a lot of time dealing with artifacts. So it's not really surprising that I have an interest in 8-track, which combines physical artifacts (cartridges, players, etc) with an extinct audio format. There's also something inherently appealing about listening to something that you can't download from i-Tunes or order from Amazon. You can't experience 8-track digitally - you have to have the player and the cartridges. Like vinyl, it produces a deeper, "warmer" sound than digital recordings. Plus you have to love the Rube Goldberg charm of a machine that has a moving play head but which can't fast forward or rewind (you can change tracks, which is the 8-track equivalent of flipping sides, but that's it).

I like the fact that I can get ridiculously excited over getting twenty cardboard outer sleeves and a cleaning cartridge in the mail. I like the fact that I'm typing this blog while listening to a quadraphonic recording of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on a cartridge that's well over 30 years old and still works just fine. Most of all, I love the fact that while we both have a collection of several thousand songs that can fit on a thumb drive, I also have an 8-track player and you probably don't. So there.

An Absence of Courtesy

2010-08-28T23:27:00.002-04:00

This week, I unsubscribed from the Vertebrate Paleontology Listserve, having been on it for nearly 10 years. Honestly, it was high time. It clutters up my mailbox with a bunch of inconsequential guff, usually along the lines of "can anyone send me a PDF of this paper?" and "please re-send in plain text" (don't get me started on that one). Lately, however, what's been getting me down could best be described as an absence of professional courtesy. In the past week we've had one respondent level a series of accusations at the current President of the United States, culiminating in the claim that he only got his position because of the color of his skin; a second respondent has likened religious belief to a phenomenon he has observed in dogs; and a third respondent basically telling the second respondent that he didn't known anything because he had never read a paper on creationism written by the third respondent (who, by the way, has no background in theology that I'm aware of). I think it's great that the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of expression - I just wish it carried a rider that citizens think before they exercise that right.

Update

2010-08-21T12:14:00.002-04:00

Following on from yesterday's post, those of you wanting the full NSF program solicitation can find it here.

You Heard It First Here.....

2010-08-20T15:48:00.002-04:00

NSF has announced a funding opportunity for the creation of a national digital data resource for collections. No program solicitation as yet, but there is a deadline - December 10th of this year. (gulp)

Your Chance to Help

2010-08-17T23:15:00.003-04:00

Reposting this request. If you want to know a little more about the background, click here.

"Dear all,

Liverpool Museums are attempting to oppose proposed cuts to their budget that will seriously threaten the service that they provide and could lead to the closure of sections of museums, or whole museums within the city. (This is the same city that was awarded the European Capital of Culture and is designated as a World Heritage Site.) As the government has now shut down the e-petition site for 10 Downing Street, an online petition has been made available at Ipetitions. If you can, please find the time to sign the petition and support their attempt to maintain the public accessibility of understandings of regional and international heritage.

The prompt for a donation from ipetitions can be ignored without affecting the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nationalmuseumsliverpool/

Best wishes,
Alastair Vannan"

A Matter of Image

2010-08-14T16:43:00.008-04:00

As a museum-ite, I was immediately drawn to a post on the Center for the Future of Museums' blog entitled "Librarians. Sheesh." This great title pretty much sums up the relationship between museum workers and librarians. In principal, our fields are very similar - we both spend our time ensuring the long-term preservation of things and making those things more accessible to people who want to experience them. In practice, we're pretty much different species. One sure-fire way to piss off a collection manager is to say, "Oh, I get it; you're like a librarian, right?"

Librarians and collection managers are uneasy allies. At some level, we collection managers have never really forgiven librarians for realizing the importance of information management before we did. I sit in meetings with librarians and sigh as they rattle off references to metadata standards and authorities in a manner suggesting that all confusion and randomness has been removed from their professional lives. I get round this by telling myself that my collections data are much more complex than theirs (it's a book, for chrissakes - how much metadata can it have?), as are the uses that we put them too, and that this makes them resistant to standardization. I don't say this with much conviction, because I can't get over the sneaking suspicion that librarians may just be better information managers.

Anyway, this delightful post by AAM staffer Lauren Silbermann was actually about how librarians have again stolen a march on museum-ites by spreading, virally, across cyberspace with a series of YouTube videos, blogs, etc., all promoting the idea that libraries and their guardians are a hip, trendy, pop-culture phenomenon. She illustrates this with a video produced by students and faculty at the University of Washington's Information School (boy, even the library schools have trendy names these days) in which they parody Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." I think they are supposed to be challenging stereotypes of librarians, although if you asked me to come up with a stereotype for a librarian I'd probably say "mostly female; highly-educated; liberal in outlook (personally, professionally, and politically); and more likely than not to sport some form of body modification (tattoo or piercing)" [see above for evidence]. In other words, not a million miles away from what's on display in this video.

Anyway, Lauren's contention is that it's high time that we museum people got on-line with some museum-orientated fun that would make us more accessible and pop-culture-friendly to Joe Public. It's a compelling argument, if only because of my secret desire to get in the face of librarians, but, with all due respect to Lauren, I'm going to offer a counter opinion.

To start, let me share a conversation I had with my brother some years ago. Pete, who is a physician, was asking me what I actually did at the museum, so I told him about a project we were working on to recurate our bat collection. We had around 125,000 specimens of bat and we were re-jaring fluid specimens, tying on new labels, checking IDs, updating our database records, etc. I remember a look of wonder spreading across his face, and I thought to myself (in the rather pathetic manner typical of younger brothers) "wow, he's really impressed." When I got to the end there was a pause. Then he said "let me get this straight. They actually pay you to do stuff like that?"

There, in a nutshell, is our challenge. I don't think we have a problem with convincing people that what we do in museums is "kooky," "eccentric," or even "fun." But I think we have a big problem convincing them that it's actually useful, let alone important. It's often an uphill battle, even within our own institutions, to argue that funds should be spent on collections care rather than, say, a big new blockbuster exhibit. Now imagine trying to argue that public money should be used for tying labels on pickled bats, rather than paying for a child's MRI. Not so funny anymore, is it?

In a bid to make ourselves more effective advocates for our field, the natural history collections community has spent the last 20-plus years trying to show that we are a group of dedicated and highly trained professionals who make a significant contribution to the scientific and societal well-being of the nation and who are worth listening to. As opposed to a bunch of loveable goofballs that muck around with dead animals. Like I said, it's been an uphill battle, but as I've mentioned in previous posts (e.g. this one) we actually seem to be gaining some traction. Under the circumstances, I'm not sure that parading our "geek chic" should be high on the list of our priorities.

Besides, try doing a Google image search for "sexy librarian." Then do one for "sexy collections manager." We're way behind the eight ball on this one.....

A Study in Contrasts

2010-08-11T08:41:00.003-04:00

Two articles in yesterday's New York Times make an interesting study in contrasts. First, Sarah Lyall did a nice review of how government austerity measures in the UK are beginning to bite. As you know, I've been blogging ad nauseum about the impacts of these cuts on the UK museum sector; you can read the most recent of these posts here. It's clear that if you work in a cultural institution in Britain, then there are tough times ahead (unless you're a volunteer, in which case the outlook is really quite rosy).

In the US, by contrast, it seems that the burning issue in the museum world is the whopping tax breaks that certain museum directors get on their exceedingly expensive (and rent-free) apartments. These are discussed by Kevin Flynn and Stephanie Strom in another NYT article. It's hard to imagine any head of a UK museum being paid that much, even prior to the current cost-conscious regime, and the level of housing described in the article would be far beyond the means of even the big national museums.

Ironically enough, however, I think the Tory half of the coalition government would probably sympathize with the argument that, at the rarified levels where museum directors are recruited, market forces dictate generous remuneration packages, including housing. By contrast, the dour, Calvinist, Liberal Democrat contingent would see this as spendthrift nonsense, and wonder why the directors don't live in studio apartments and use their museum's function rooms for official entertaining.

These are the sort of conflicts that will eventually pull the coalition apart, which they are already doing; as this amusing article from yesterday's Independent reports, some Lib Dems "fear the party is acting as a fig leaf for ideologically driven spending cuts by the Tories." Gosh, do you think so?

A Question of Growth

2010-08-09T16:06:00.008-04:00

The latest edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology contains not one, but two papers on the resolutely unglamorous topic of growth series. This was a sufficiently momentous occasion that I felt a blog post was warranted. No, really, don't stop reading! Because I want to try and convince you that constructing growth series is a critical part of systematic and evolutionary studies that the aspiring paleontologist neglects at their peril.

Although it may seem obvious, it's important to realize that many (if not most) organisms change their morphology dramatically over the course of their lifespan. This causes problems for systematic biologists, who want to compare character states in different types of organisms in order to reconstruct phylogeny. You have to compare like with like. In other words, it's no good comparing the juvenile of one species with an adult of another if the character you're studying changes with age.

Still think this is obvious? Well OK smarty-pants, let's take a look at a published research paper, namely Flannery, Archer, and Maynes (1987)[1], which proposed a radical shake-up of the phylogeny of phalangerid marsupials. One of the critical morphological characters used by the authors was the extent of the exposure of the ectotympanic (the bony tube that forms the floor of the external ear canal in mammals) on the front face of the postglenoid process (a vertical bony "buffer" at the back of the jaw joint that means your lower jaw doesn't end up wrapped round your ears when your temporalis muscle contracts).

The problem is that the extent of the ectotympanic on the postglenoid process is age-related. In young phalangerids, the bone makes up more than half of the process, but as they age it gets rudely shoved aside by another bone, the squamosal; the squamosal grows more than the ectotympanic, which gradually contributes less and less to the postglenoid process, until in the end it is barely visible. This was a problem, because a number of the phalangerid species that were included in the study were very rare in museum collections and were represented by only juvenile or very aged individuals. As a results, some species in the study appeared to have a postglenoid process with an ectotympanic exposure, while others didn't. Based on these apparent differences, the authors tried to define a group of phalangerid possums that were united by the fact that they had no ectotympanic exposure on the postglenoid process. Unfortunately, all phalangerids eventually lack an ectotympanic exposure if they live long enough, so this royally mucked-up their phylogeny.

As a graduate student working on phalangerids, I spent a lot of time reading the Flannery et al paper, and it soon became apparent that I wasn't seeing the same characters in specimens that they were. In the end, the way that I teased apart the mystery of the postglenoid process (not very Hardy Boys, I know) was to build a growth series of phalangerid skulls. I was fortunate that I had a very large museum collection - the Mammal Department of London's Natural History Museum - just down the road from me, with hundreds of specimens covering nearly all the known species of the group. So I could select specimens of different ages from the same species, same sex, and even the same geographic population, thus minimizing the chance that other types of variation could creep in and mess things up for me (this, by the way, is one of the reasons we bother to collect so many specimens of the same animal).

In the end, I was able to untangle this problem because I had access to a larger collection of specimens than the Australian group. The challenge for paleontologists is that we're rarely this lucky. The chances of an animal being preserved as a fossil are almost vanishingly small and the temporal resolution of the fossil record is so low that even when two animals are found in the same site, they may come from populations separated by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. So it takes a rare set of circumstances to preserve a fossil population at the same level of detail that can be obtained from collecting Recent specimens.

The first of the two JVP papers describes just such a situation. Karen Black, Mike Archer, Suzanne Hand, and Henk Godthelp describe a collection of fossils from the Riversleigh area of Queensland [2]. Over the last 30 or so years Riversleigh has yielded a host of spectacular fossils from the Oligo-Miocene of Australia; the ones described by Black et al belong to an extinct species of herbivorous marsupial called Nimbadon lavarackorum that lived around 15 million years ago. Nimbadon belongs to an extinct group called the diprotodontids, who were the heavyweights of the ancient Australian mammal fauna; some species were the size of rhinos, although Nimbadon was considerably smaller, around the size of a sheep.

What makes the Riversleigh find so important is the nature of the site where the fossils were found, AL90. 15 million years ago, this was a cave with a vertically-positioned entrance, down which from time to time unfortunate individuals of Nimbadon would blunder. In effect, the cave acted like a natural pitfall trap, sampling the local Nimbadon population. As a result of this, Black and her co-workers were able to construct a genuine growth series for this long-vanished animal, which demonstrated that the early growth patterns of the skull are mirror those seen in living marsupials, and which also gave insights into the development of the large air sinuses in the cranium that are a distinctive characteristic of diprotodontids.

The important thing about this paper is that the nature of the site means Black et al can be confident that they are actually sampling the same population. I'm not convinced that the same can be said of the second paper, by John Scannella and Jack Horner [3]. This attracted a fair amount of attention in the national press, and quite a lot more attention here at Yale, by proposing that the ceratopsian dinosaur Torosaurus (very much an icon for the Peabody Museum) is actually the adult form of the much better known Triceratops. By studying a growth series of Triceratops, Scannella and Horner argue, first, that bone histology of skulls of Triceratops originally classified as "adult" suggests that the animals are not fully grown and, second, that the anatomical changes seen in the skull of Triceratops as it ages, if projected forward into an "adult" animal, would produce something that looks suspiciously like Torosaurus. There are no known juvenile specimens of Torosaurus.

Given that Torosaurus is such an iconic presence at the Peabody (a life-size bronze reconstruction of it towers over Whitney Avenue, outside the Museum) you might be expecting me to launch into a searing denunciation of Scanella and Horner's work. If so, I fear you will be disappointed. This sort of reexamination of taxonomic hypotheses is exactly what science is all about and using growth series is exactly how one should go about doing so. The slightly raised eyebrow is because I'm mildly skeptical that the growth series used by Scanella and Horner (which was originally proposed by Horner and Goodwin in 2006 [4]) actually represents a single population of Triceratops - it seems unlikely that specimens drawn from a variety of different localities, of different ages, could constitute a growth series of the consistency seen in Black et al's study. Whether this makes any difference or not remains to be seen.

Both these papers are important because they once again remind us, should any reminder be needed, that fossils were once living animals, and the morphology that today is literally "set in stone" was once plastic and changeable. As we try and piece together evolutionary patterns, the importance of the unglamorous growth series should not be underestimated.

[Accompanying figure is taken from Black et al, 2010. For those of you that want references, here they are:

[1] Flannery, T.F., M. Archer, and G. Maynes. 1987. The phylogenetic relationships of living phalangerids (Phalangeroidea: Marsupialia) with a suggested new taxonomy. pp477-506 in Archer M. (ed) Possums and Opposums: Studies in Evolution. Sydney, Surrey Beatty & Sons and the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.

[2] Black, K.H., M. Archer, S.J. Hand, and H. Godthelp. 2010. First comprehensive analysis of cranial ontogeny in a fossil marsupial—from a 15-million-year-old cave deposit in Northern Australia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30(4):993-1011.

[3] Scanella, J.B., and J.R. Horner. 2010. Torosaurus Marsh, 1891, is Triceratops Marsh, 1889 (Ceratopsidae: Chasmosaurinae): synonymy through ontogeny. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30(4):1157-1168.

[4] Horner, J. R., and M. B. Goodwin. 2006. Major cranial changes during Triceratops ontogeny. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 273:2757–2761.]

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