Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2019 - 16

Society Reports
2019 Summit include georeferencing, data use, and specimen
trait data.
Our Education & Outreach Coordinator, Molly Phillips,
participated in the QUBES Summer Workshop - Evolution
of Data in the Classroom: From Data to Data Science. Many
other E & O activities are in the works with an emphasis on
inclusion. Please talk with her about E & O opportunities
to collaborate or contribute. WeDigBio will be Oct 17-20,
2019, and if you want to participate in any way (e.g., local
organizer on your part of the planet, volunteer, hosting an
event), contact Austin Mast at iDigBio, and keep an eye on
the website. If collection metrics interest you, please read the
thought-provoking post-symposium blog post from SPNHC
2019 symposium on Collecting Measure of Success. We're
still in the early stages of analyzing and summarizing the fantastic survey feedback you all offered. Symposium organizers (from RBGE, iDigBio, and Ag-Canada) were thrilled to
have excellent attendance. It was also great to see increased
participation at SPNHC of members from the entomological
collections community.
Some of us are busy working on jointly-developed abstracts
to submit for SPNHC & ICOM NATHIST 2020. Some topics
floating around are museum data leadership, science communication, collections use in undergraduate education, and
the digital future and digital assets of museums. If you have
workshop ideas for mobilizing or using collections data,
iDigBio is looking for your proposals. And just in case you
missed it, find out more about our latest activities in the iDigBio Spotlight. New Thematic Collection Networks are soon
to be announced, one is Terrestrial Parasite Tracker which
plans to capture ectoparasite host-association data to study
this phenomenon.
Respectfully submitted,
Deborah L. Paul, SPNHC representative to iDigBio

International Society for
Biological and Environmental Repositories
The ISBER 2019 annual meeting was
held May 7-10, in Shanghai, and was
the first to be held in Asia. This was
ISBER's 20th anniversary year and to
reflect this, the Scientific Program Advisory Committee chose "Honoring Our Past, Celebrating the
Present, and Envisioning our Future" as the meeting theme.
This meeting featured plenary sessions, educational workshops, networking events, corporate workshops, contributed
16 * SPNHC Connection

paper sessions, poster sessions, and working group discussions. Vendors from around the world demonstrated the latest
products, services, and technology in the field of repository
and specimen collection management. A regional meeting for
the Americas will also be held in Minneapolis November 4-5,
2019, for those that were unable to travel to Shanghai.
Last year, ISBER published the Best Practices: Recommendations for Repositories Fourth Edition (www.isber.org/
bestpractices). It is our aim that the SPNHC community can
use these recommendations as guidance when managing their
own collections. ISBER is currently conducting a survey
study on downloads and usage of the Best Practices document. If you have used the new Best Practices to assess or
improve specimen collection, storage, use and/or governance
of your own collection, please email Breda Zimkus (bzimkus@oeb.harvard.edu) to share this information. We also
invite SPNHC members to share how these recommendations
were specifically applied to your collection. If there are specific areas within the Best Practices that do not adequately address the operation of museum collections, please inform the
SPNHC representative to ISBER. We hope that the SPNHC
community will work together with ISBER improve these
recommendations for museum repositories.
Respectfully submitted,
Breda M. Zimkus, SPNHC representative to ISBER

Managers of Australasian Herbarium
Collections - Councils of Heads of Australasian Herbaria
Herbaria in Australia and New Zealand
continue to work with federal agencies
to ensure the safe arrival of botanical
specimens and streamline the significant biosecurity regulations. Managers
of Australasian Herbarium Collections
(MAHC), a subcommittee of the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria (CHAH) remind our overseas herbarium
partners who wish to return loaned materials or are sending
exchange/donations to Australasia to contact the collection
manager of the appropriate institution before sending material. This is to ensure the necessary and appropriate documentation is attached to parcels for efficient gateway entry, and so
we can track the safe arrival of shipments.
Digitization of collections and new infrastructure dominates
discussions in the Australasian herbarium community. The
National Herbarium of New South Wales (NSW) has partnered with Picturae and began the imaging and transcription

https://www.qubeshub.org/community/groups/summer2019 https://www.qubeshub.org/community/groups/summer2019 https://www.wedigbio.org/ http://www.isber.org/bestpractices http://www.isber.org/bestpractices https://www.wedigbio.org/ https://www.idigbio.org/content/your-curatorial-work-matters-collecting-measures-success-symposium-spnhc-2019 https://www.idigbio.org/content/looking-ways-participate https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=5c564b4cf1e8157b450723e1c&&id=6da09c0a71 https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=5c564b4cf1e8157b450723e1c&&id=6da09c0a71 http://www.parasitetracker.org/

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