Memorandum submitted by the Natural Sciences
Collections Associations
The Natural Sciences Collections Association
represents specialist staff that look after Natural Science Collections
in National, regional, local and university museums and institutions
throughout the United Kingdom and Eire. We have members in the
National & centrally funded Museums at the NHM, RMS Edinburgh,
Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, Kew gardens and
at almost all the smaller local council museums in the UK, representing
Scunthorpe, York, Leeds, Glasgow, Birmingham, Newcastle, Whitby,
Norwich, Hereford, Portsmouth, Bristol, Plymouth, Dorchester,
Chester, Carlisle, Bolton, Ipswich, Colchester, Winchester, Bedford,
Horniman, Woolaton Hall Nottingham, Herbert Museum Coventry, Leicester,
Peterborough, Maidstone, Brighton, Haselmere, Scarborough, Sheffield,
Sunderland, Perth, Inverness & Jersey and at University collections
at UCL London, Oxford, Cambridge, Reading, Glasgow, Hunterian,
Dundee and at the Royal College of Surgeons, Holborn and the Central
Science Labs at Sand Hutton. There are other collections where
there are no expert curators present, which are even more "at
risk" with no representative.
Systematic collections housed outside of national
museums have valuable data associated with them which not only
supplements but also complements the larger collections held by
the National collections such as Kew Gardens and the Natural History
Museum. Smaller museums hold collections not only of material
of local importance but often of national & international
importance as well. These collections are themselves finding that
financial constraints are reducing their contribution to taxonomic
study of the world biota and geology. Many of these smaller collections
hold material that is the cultural heritage of the area and is
a valuable educational resource for nature conservation. They
are also useful for local recording and can provide foreign &
historic material which may now be extinct, collected from rain
forest habitats which are now decimated by third world development
or hold material that might now be impossible to obtain for study
due to new strict international rules on collecting.
There is an increasing shortage of funding from
local government who have many competing priorities to decide
between. The closure of some museums has placed collections at
risk through inadequate, inaccessible storage, whilst others are
dispersed or sold. Care of these collections is being compromised
with the reduction of funding for suitable access and storage
and especially for maintaining the expert curators in post who
often are the taxonomists who can access the taxonomic data held
within the collections for their own and others' research. If
funding is short for posts, it is even shorter for projects (eg
digitisation, databasing, web-accessibility) that would make collections
and the information associated with them more accessible to the
wider community. Maintaining and developing such collections is
essential so that they are readily available to taxonomic research.
The reduced use of university collections reflects the reduction
in taxonomy based learning and research which is so important
to the future of understanding how the World's geo & biodiversity
and wildlife can be protected and conserved. Such university collections
which are not now being actively used could become at risk, as
the university sees no reason to fund and maintain an underused
resource. It is imperative that maintaining the raw material for
taxonomic research is properly funded, so as to make the resource
available to current and future researchers in systematic biology
& geology.
A necessary complement to the collections are
the specialist curators, either taxonomist themselves or specialist
collections managers, who can make specimens and data available
to researchers. Concern is acute that this work force is ageing
and there is insufficient recruitment to the sector to pass on
skills to a new generation. Posts are often lost or frozen upon
retirements as resources are deployed elsewhere by cash-strapped
institutions. New/potential entrants to the profession who may
have good generic skills lack specialist knowledge and need to
have opportunities for training from experts and a reasonable
career structure to encourage them to stay in the profession.
The old practice of taking on graduate trainees was one way of
passing on skills. The "amateur naturalist" sector is
looked to as a repository of field and identification skills but
here also there is an ageing population of experts with too few
younger people to learn from them. Attracting job applicants has
been a particular problem where the funding (ie salary) is inadequate
and this is a particular concern when so many jobs are offered
as short-term contracts.
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