Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020 - 13

Society Reports
4. Train people in the amateur community to identify items
as stolen.
5. Digitization and cataloging to help identify what has
gone missing from collections.
6. Regular collection audits.
Respectfully submitted,
Paul Mayer and Rob Zschernitz, Co-chairs

Collections and the Biodiversity Crisis
The Biodiversity Crisis Response
Committee has been busy planning a
SPNHC & ICOM-NATHIST conference Town Hall Meeting, S0.1. In this
session, the committee will moderate an
open discussion to identify timely strategic directions that SPNHC can take
to contribute to the protection of global
biodiversity, ecosystems and human
health. The session will include an overview of the issues and
discussion with attendees and invited experts. An emphasis
will be placed on ways to be involved with the committee and
action items that will set the foundation for meaningful and
sustained organizational and individual efforts.
We are currently in the process of distributing a survey
that will help us gauge the experiences and ideas of people
broadly involved with biodiversity sciences as they pertain to
the biodiversity crisis and responses to it. Results from this
survey will be presented in the Town Hall Meeting and will
also be used to inform committee activities.
We would greatly appreciate your participation in this survey,
www.tiny.cc/biocrisis, and encourage you to share it far and
wide. Thanks in advance for your time and for sharing your
views. We hope you'll join our Town Hall Meeting in Edinburgh to participate in the discussion and help us forge a
productive path forward.
Respectfully submitted,
Libby Ellwood, Chair

International Relations
The International Relations Committee meeting was well
attended this year, and we had a constructive and interesting discussion with thoughts and ideas for moving forward.
Much of the discussion covered matters arising in other committee meetings so it was recognised that there is a crossover
with the work of other committees. It was suggested that the

committee chairs might benefit from a
quick get together, breakfast or coffee,
to brief each other before the council
meeting at each SPNHC meeting. We
might benefit also from beginning to use
the SPNHC Slack channel to talk more
frequently.
Suzanne Ryder presented some simple
graphs produced from membership data
available to date. The graphs showed
the fluctuation of total members since
1994 and how international membership
was made up over the same time period.
It was pointed out that the data available
was not easy to manipulate, and going
forward we should carefully consider
the data we gather and how it can be used to tell us about the
society. The correct data would allow us to consider the need,
value and benefits to society members. It was agreed that
careful thought should be given as to what data we should
collect going forward to better inform Council about the
society membership.
Language and translations was also a discussion topic, and
it is thought that we should revisit the possibility of including content in other languages. Perhaps we could, as willing
members translate key pages of the website and add articles/
literature in other languages to our resources.
After a very successful meeting in New Zealand in 2018 it
was recognised that the society needed to maintain the interest that the meeting generated to the members in the southern
hemisphere. We discussed the possibility of a "recruiting"
ambassador by region to relay information or create a "node"
which could run meetings adjacent to the main SPHNC meeting and live stream the technical session, etc. Ideas to help
retain engagement are very welcome.

Actions for the coming year
*

Work with membership to define the membership and
activities metadata we need to collect.
- What data-more comprehensive and considered.
- Data protection/permissions.

Past meeting attendee lists.

Wikipedia page update-needs doing, needs volunteers.

Accessibility, value and benefits to retain members that
cannot always attend meetings.
- Nodes (recruit regional ambassadors)
- Translations
- Live stream meetings
March 2020 * 13

http://www.tiny.cc/biocrisis

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020

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