Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020 - 15

Society Reports
tion). The #ARCSChat Podcast is the first Tuesday of each
month at 8 pm Eastern time and is available on the ARCS
YouTube page. The next workshop will be the Courier Workshop on March 12-13, 2020, in Fort Worth, Texas. All are
welcome to participate in the #ARCSChat and workshops.
The ARCS Forum, which contains queries and responses
about registration and collections management issues, is
available through the website for ARCS members only.
A list of consulting registrars and collections specialists can
be found in the OnContract Directory of the ARCS website
(https://www.arcsinfo.org/on-contract).
The ARCS website also has an extensive list of resources,
professional development opportunities, and useful links for
collections management.
Respectfully submitted,
John E. Simmons, SPNHC representative to ARCS

Biodiversity Information Standards
The 2019 annual meeting of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)
was part of a larger conference branded
Biodiversity_Next that also included
the Global Biodiversity Information
Facility (GBIF), a new pan-European
research infrastructure initiative (DiSSCo), the national resource for digitized
information about vouchered natural history collections
(iDigBio) and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF). The conference was hosted by the Naturalis
Biodiversity Center in collaboration with the Netherlands
Biodiversity Information Facility in Leiden, Netherlands,
October 22-25, 2019 (https://biodiversitynext.org/). The
conference was a great success attracting over 700 attendees!
You can check out the abstracts for talks and posters along
with the presentations themselves in many cases, as they were
published as a Proceedings in the journal Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS: https://biss.pensoft.
net/).
For those of you who are new to TDWG or are interested in
learning more, please visit our website now integrated with
our GitHub repository (https://www.tdwg.org/). TDWG also
recently started an open access journal called Biodiversity Information Science and Standards or BISS, referenced above.
This journal serves two purposes, first to publish the TDWG
Proceedings of abstracts for their annual conference, and
second, a forum for biodiversity informaticians to publish articles on biodiversity standards, methods, guidelines, models

and applications. If you have content relevant to these topics
please consider publishing in BISS. With specific relevance
to SPNHC, members of the Natural Collections Description
Interest Group continue to make significant progress on the
task of creating a new "collections description" data standard
for describing collections of natural history materials at the
collection level; one NCD record describes one entire collection. Also, there is increasing discussion and engagement on
curation attribution standards. As I continue to stress: "the
standards being evaluated by TDWG, and the applications
that implement them, have a direct impact on many SPNHC
members involved with specimen data capture, management
and curation."
In 2020, TDWG is once again strategically partnering
with other like-minded biodiversity entities. The conference branded "Biodiversity Summit 2020" will be hosted
by iDigBio and the National Museum of Natural History
(NMNH) Smithsonian, and will include the GBIF governing
board meetings. The conference will be held in Alexandria,
Virginia, USA, September 20-25, 2020 (https://www.idigbio.
org/content/biodiversity-summit-2020). As the current Chair
of TDWG, I am very excited about this event and hope to see
many of you there!
Finally, if you are interested in biodiversity standards, I
would urge you to become a member and to contribute. It
takes a wide range of skill sets and knowledge to produce
standards and all are welcome.
Respectfully submitted,
James Macklin, SPNHC representative to TDWG

Collections Stewardship Professional
Network-American Association of
Museums
The next meeting of the Collections
Stewardship Professional Network
(CSAAM) will take place during the
American Alliance of Museums annual
meeting and expo in San Francisco,
California, May 17-20, 2020.
The CS listserv continues to host a
steady stream of queries, responses, and
announcements and is available to anyone interested (https://
www.collectionsstewardship.org/listserve).
The CS website (https://www.collectionsstewardship.org)
maintains a supplies and materials list, a form and policy
swap page, a list of publications and papers of interest to colMarch 2020 * 15

https://www.arcsinfo.org/on-contract https://www.idigbio.org/content/biodiversity-summit-2020 https://www.idigbio.org/content/biodiversity-summit-2020 https://biodiversitynext.org/ https://biss.pensoft.net/ https://biss.pensoft.net/ https://www.tdwg.org/ https://www.collectionsstewardship.org/listserve https://www.collectionsstewardship.org/listserve https://www.collectionsstewardship.org/

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020

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