Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020 - 6

Society Reports
Archives Committee

Best Practices Committee

The Smithsonian Institution Archives
(SIA) houses the archives of the Society
for the Preservation of Natural History
Collections (SPNHC). SIA currently
holds 16 deposits of SPNHC material
totaling 23.5 cubic feet. Examples of
this material include Collection Forum,
SPNHC Connection, documentation of
annual meetings, financial files, election ballots, member-at-large files, various committee files,
videos, CDs and photographs.

The Treasurer has recently purchased
a Zoom web conferencing account using Best Practices Committee funds,
and the first virtual committee meeting
is currently being scheduled. If other
SPNHC committees would like to use
the account to host a meeting, please
contact the committee co-chairs to
request a meeting date/time and you
will be provided with login credentials.
Many thanks to Melinda Peters for her
assistance with researching and purchasing Zoom.

The members of the Archives Committee act as liaison
between SIA and SPNHC. In preparation for the transfer to
SIA, the documentation and material related to the activity
of the Society are organized in archival boxes and a "finding
aid" typed for each box. The material is arranged in folders
with year, type of documentation, and a brief summary of the
folder's content. When known, files received from individuals are noted. Although the Society has moved to electronic
publications, these are printed and cataloged for deposit. The
finding aid along with the boxes are transferred to SIA, where
an accession number is assigned to the deposit and the finding
aid uploaded to the SIA website.
Material, documentation, images, and publications have been
received from various sources and individuals since the formation of this Archives Committee. Twelve cubic feet of material dating from 1982-2018 was processed and transferred
to SIA on August 14, 2019 under the Accession number
19-198 (https://spnhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Archives19-198.pdf). To find other material deposited at SIA go
to https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/search?query=SPNHC.
Many of the archives holdings are located off-site. If copies
of material are needed or if you need to consult an accession,
please contract SIA Reference Team at osiaref@si.edu to
retrieve records.
As we now move into the digital age the question about how
to process and store electronic images and photographs is
being discussed. The committee is working with SIA and will
be transferring this digital material to the archives later in
2020.
The committee did have one request for material from the SI
Archives this year. The 2001 Collection Forum, vol. 17 was
missing from the SPNHC website. A request was submitted
to SIA and within the week a digital copy was produced and
now can be accessed via the SPNHC website.
Respectively submitted,
Carol Kelloff, Chair
6 * SPNHC Connection

Content details of new book Preventive Conservation: Collection Storage
are now available on the SPNHC wiki:
https://spnhc.biowikifarm.net/wiki/Collection_Storage. This
new book is a collaboration between the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, the American Institute for Conservation, the Smithsonian Institution, and The
George Washington University Museum Studies Program. It
concentrates on preventive conservation and will be useful to
anyone in the field of collection care looking for an overview
of collection storage, whether an established specialist, an
emerging professional, or a student. The wiki page for the
book includes links to download the Table of Contents, read
the chapter abstracts, and take a peek at one example of the
useful Storage-at-a-Glance section. Thank you to Rachael
Perkins Arenstein for making this information available.
A Fossil Collecting Code of Conduct page is also now available on the SPNHC wiki: https://spnhc.biowikifarm.net/wiki/
Fossil_Collecting_Code_of_Conduct. This document was
created by Jacob Bridy for those collecting fossils on private
lands and includes a list of do's and don'ts when you are on
someone else's property. This code of conduct will encourage
respect for the land and will give guidelines on how to ethically engage in paleontological excavations.
The chair of the Citations subcommittee has been working
to transfer citations from EndNote to Zotero, which can be
accessed online by any SPNHC member and does not require an account (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2077962/
spnhc/library). Citations have been fully transferred to a
desktop Zotero library where they are being standardized for
the Zotero data structure in batches by year. The batches are
being uploaded one year at a time starting with the earliest
years. Future citations will be added directly to the online
Zotero library.
The current Best Practices Committee co-chairs will be step-

https://www.zoom.us https://store.culturalheritage.org/site/index.php?app=ecom&ns=prodshow&ref=AIC-31 https://store.culturalheritage.org/site/index.php?app=ecom&ns=prodshow&ref=AIC-31 https://spnhc.biowikifarm.net/wiki/Collection_Storage https://spnhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Archives19-198.pdf https://spnhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Archives19-198.pdf https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/search?query=SPNHC https://spnhc.biowikifarm.net/wiki/Fossil_Collecting_Code_of_Conduct https://spnhc.biowikifarm.net/wiki/Fossil_Collecting_Code_of_Conduct https://www.zotero.org/groups/2077962/spnhc/library https://www.zotero.org/groups/2077962/spnhc/library

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020