News

When public health officials become aware of the first signs of a disease outbreak, they need to determine a few critical things as quickly as possible. What’s the disease agent? How did it get here? How does it spread and how can it be contained? Has it been seen before? If so, what was the approach and how well did it work?

IWGSC member Diane DiEuliis and colleagues recently published an opinion piece on the roll of collections in infectious disease research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The New York Times is compiling a guide to notable digitization efforts.  They even call for suggestions of others to add.

They also published a related article on the digitization efforts at the Berlin museum and the iDigBio program.

The Interagency Working Group on Scientific Collections (IWGSC) was tasked with compiling and making available agency policies related to the management of federal scientific collections. Through a joint effort between the USDA and Smithsonian Institution, the IWGSC Clearinghouse now provides federal agencies and the public an central location to find these policies and other information about federal scientific collections.

The IWGSC has been following a series of funding challenges for state and private scientific collections in the USA, and here is the next one – The Illinois State Museum in Springfield, which has significant natural history collections, especially in anthropology, will be closed per a decision by the Governor at the end of September despite a recommendation by a bipartisan commission to keep it open.

The IWGSC launched the Registry of US Federal Scientific Collections, a a community-curated, comprehensive database of information about object-based scientific collections that are owned and/or managed by US Federal government departments and agencies.

This article is a reprint of an original article posted on the White House blog, 20 March 2014. The original post can be found here.

In a memorandum released 20 March 2014, OSTP Director John P. Holdren directed Federal agencies to develop policies that will improve the management of and access to scientific collections they own or support. Scientific collections are assemblies of physical objects such as drilling cores from the ocean floor and glaciers, seeds, space rocks, cells, mineral samples, fossils, and more. Federal agencies develop and maintain scientific collections as records of our past and investments in our future.

Collections manager David Furth shows some of the diversity in the insect collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. (Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution)

These collections are public assets. They play an important role in promoting public health and safety, homeland security, trade, and economic development, medical research, resource management, education, and environmental monitoring.

They are studied across diverse fields of research and are used and re-used to validate and extend past research results as new analytical techniques develop. For the American public, students, and teachers, they are also treasure troves of information ripe for exploration and learning.  

And there is no better time to highlight this important new policy than Sunshine Week – an annual celebration of transparency and public participation in government.

The memorandum fulfills the requirements of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 that called on OSTP to develop “policies for the management and use of Federal scientific collections to improve the quality, organization, access, including online access, and long-term preservation of such collections for the benefit of the scientific enterprise.”

Databasing butterfly specimens in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. (Photo by Karolyn Darrow, Smithsonian Institution)

The policies developed by Federal agencies in response to the new memo will also be consistent with requirements in the Executive Order on Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information and my previous memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research.

Agency policies will help make scientific collections and information about scientific collections more transparent and accessible. For example, photographs and 3D scans of objects in Federal scientific collections will be made freely available to the public.

Responsible stewardship of scientific collections was of particular importance to Dr. Holdren’s immediate predecessor as Director of OSTP, Dr. John Marburger III, who passed away in 2011. We believe he would be proud of this positive step toward that important goal.

Read the new policy memorandum here.

This blog post was written by Michael Stebbins is Assistant Director for Biotechnology at OSTP and Erica Lieberman is a Student Volunteer at OSTP.

Nathan K. Lujan and Larry M. Page authored an Op-Ed in The New York Times on the importance of natural history collections and yet the seemingly common lack of support.

In Substantial Shift, Museum Industry Group Pushes Directors to Break the Rules to Survive(link is external)

As art museum directors across the United States confront balance sheets devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, the field’s leading professional organization has adopted temporary measures aimed at giving them greater flexibility in how they manage their finances.

This is how bad things are for museums: They now have a green light to sell off their art(link is external)

However, in an unprecedented move, and as a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic, the AAMD has recently relaxed its guidelines. It’s too soon to gauge the effect, but it is already big news in the art world. Once unthinkable, the notion of selling off a Claude Monet or two to plug a budgetary hole — or to fend off a total financial meltdown — is suddenly something to contemplate.