Everyone, This has been an interesting discussion about collection donations. As a museum collection manager, I can tell you that we love to get donations. However I can let you in on a few tips that will get your donated collection more attention and get it moved up the priority list for curation and integration.
1. Proper labels!!! This is the single biggest reason some donated collections languish in corners in museums. Code numbers as labels, ambiguous geographic references (e.g. Santa Rosa Mexico), and labels on only the first specimen of a series means a lot more work is going to be needed to bring this collection up to a level where it can be integrated with our general collection. Chances are such a collection will end up in a corner somewhere. Even with good labels, complete geographic information should be included--Country, state or province, locality, direction and distance to nearest town, and lat & long are always nice. I have thrown away aquatic collections that just say Bear Creek or Dry Creek since there are multiple locations in California with these names. All things being equal, if two collections come in, one labeled by the donator and one I have to label, the labeled collection will be top priority for integration every time. 2. Specimen condition. Space is money! If your collection of say crickets has the antennae going everywhere and the legs all sprawly, each specimen will probably need to be hydrated and all the body parts tucked in so they can be safely and efficiently stored. All things being equal, a collection where the specimens are nicely and compactly mounted will get priority over a donated collection where every specimens will need to be remounted. 3. Donate some money with your collection for integration. Drawers are probably around $75 these days fully decked out with units and all. A donation of as little as two or three mailing boxes of insects might easily expand to fill a drawer if all the species are housed separately. If your collection is labeled and identified, it still has to be integrated with our collection. This entails finding the place where each species goes in our collection and moving the specimens there. If we do not have that species, we have to add it in, which means finding the information for the header label, printing the label, cutting it out, and putting it in the new unit. At the end of a large donation, there is probably some adjustments to our inventory that have to be made which means changing entries in the database and printing and installing new drawer labels, both for the drawers where your material went, but also for the drawers that come after that point to the end of the family. A drawer from your collection may take 5 hours of time to integrate with ours if there are a lot of species we need to add. Even with student labor at $8.50/hour, this can be a large expense for a cabinet of insects. All things being equal, projects that have income associated with them (fulfilling awarded grants and contracts, doing pay for service id's, doing research for which I might get a good evaluation) will take priority over projects that will cost us money. 4. Be realistic about your collection. A large donation of say determined Tenebrionidae, to pick a random group, will certainly move up ahead on my to do list over another donation of Sierra frits from the same old localities or scarabs from Madera Canyon. Sorry to step on a few toes, but as curators, we think about the value a donated collection will add to the information base available to the research systematics community. Things collected over and over, even if pretty, in general hold less value for the research museum curator than collections of small dark things likely to include new species. If you do have a collection of Sierra frits from the same old localities or scarabs from Madera Canyon, you might want to think about donating to a collection in the eastern US where such material would be considered more exotic. If you do want to collect butterflies, think about improving the value of your collection now--new collecting localities (take those collecting trips to Colorado or Alaska you have always been talking about), try to document first and last butterflies of the year at the same place every year, record highest and lowest elevation records every year, expand into lycaenids or some group of moths, etc. There are still treasures out there. What might be the largest population of the dogface was discovered only a few years ago by an amateur looking in a new place. Dr. Steven L. Heydon Bohart Museum of Entomology University of California at Davis One Shields Avenue Davis CA 95616 Phone (530) 752-0493 fax (530) 752-9464 email slhey...@ucdavis.edu
