Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2019 - 13

Society Reports

Collections and the Biodiversity Crisis
In response to the growing biodiversity
crisis, and most recently the UN Report
on accelerating extinction rates (https://
www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/
blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/), several
members of the SPNHC community have been considering
the ways our organization can contribute to the protection of
sustainable ecosystems. For starters, a sessional committee on
Collections and the Biodiversity Crisis has been formed with
a few initial tasks:
*

Consider what, if anything, SPNHC should do to raise the
profile of collections in mitigating biodiversity loss, both
scientific and public awareness aspects; make recommendations for activities that could accomplish this.

Propose strategies to help collections highlight their own
efforts in this area.

Propose short and long-term goals for involvement in this
topic, if warranted.

We will meet virtually during the year, through Slack, and/or
over video conference, and will meet in person at the Edinburgh conference in June.
If you're interested in serving on this committee, please contact me: lellwood@tarpits.org
Respectfully submitted,
Libby Ellwood, Chair

Member-at-Large Reports
Deborah L. Paul
The Digitization Wiki needs you to have
a look and add resources. Contact the
Best Practices committee chairs, myself,
Genevieve Tocci, or the Wiki Rep Jessica Utrup if you have information/links you want added.
Regular community input can make this a stellar resource, but
only with your contributions.
SPNHC is on Slack. With Genevieve Tocci's leadership,
together we reached out to get committee leads invited to the
SPNHC Slack account. Liath Appleton is taking on signing

us up for a "non-profit" status Slack account. The SPNHC
Emerging Professionals Committee is already engaged in
this space, taking advantage of features that strongly support
worldwide collaboration and connectivity. If you are interested in joining us in this online community, let the Best Practices committee chairs, Genevieve Tocci, or myself know, and
we'll get you signed up. See what you can do beyond emails
and listservs.
By now, most of you will know about the Biodiversity_Next
conference in Leiden (Oct 21-25, 2019). It's a joint conference put together by TDWG, GBIF, DiSSCo, iDigBio, LifeWatch, CETAF, and including support from the JRS Foundation to support participation of African attendees. One notable

session is Digitization Next, a day-long symposium on the
latest developments in the digitization of natural history collections around the world.
And ...Data Leadership is a term I've recently come across
and have been reading about more. If you'd like to explore
this with me and develop an event around this topic, please
get in touch. Another topic that popped up on Twitter:
vouchering. This is a shout out to Andrew Deans, Curator
of the Frost Museum at Penn State. As far as I know, Andy
is leading the way with his publication of a new standard-ofpractice vouchering policy that includes encouraging communities like ecologists to submit specimens-offering help
and guidance to them for accomplishing this. I'm wondering
who else has any similar guidelines or policy documents?
Lastly, the Wikipedia page for SPNHC needs some input. If
you know the history of SPNHC well, and would like to help
improve this resource - please get in touch.
Respectively submitted,
Deborah L. Paul, MAL (2017-2020)
Not Reporting:
Amanda Lawrence (2017-2020)
Talia Karim (2018-2021)
Fran Ritchie (2018-2021)
Paul Mayer (2019-2022)
Anna Monfils (2019-2022)

September 2019 * 13

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.biodiversitynext.org/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.biodiversitynext.org/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.tdwg.org/ https://www.gbif.org/ https://www.dissco.eu/ https://www.idigbio.org/ https://www.lifewatch.eu/ https://www.lifewatch.eu/ https://www.lifewatch.eu/ https://www.jrsbiodiversity.org/ https://www.jrsbiodiversity.org/ https://sites.psu.edu/frost/2019/07/23/new-sop-on-vouchering/ https://sites.psu.edu/frost/2019/07/23/new-sop-on-vouchering/ https://sites.psu.edu/frost/2019/07/23/new-sop-on-vouchering/ https://spnhc.biowikifarm.net/wiki/Digitization

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2019