Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2016 - 14

Society Reports Respectfully submitted, Jude Southward, on behalf of Gretchen Anderson, SPNHC representative to AIC tions in Support of Biological Research program was placed on hiatus in early 2016. On behalf of ASPT, the committee participated with the Society of Herbarium Curators in a halfday symposium on herbarium management, sustainability, and visibility held immediately following the Botany2016 meeting. American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists The 2016 Annual meeting of the Society was held in conjunction with Botany2016 in Savannah, Georgia, July 31-August 3, 2016. https://www.cac-accr.ca/home The ASIH Ichthyological and Herpetological Collections Committee (IHCC) met during the 2016 Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologist held July 6-10, 2016, in New Orleans, Louisiana. This meeting was attended by 27 collection personnel representing at least 22 different institutions or collections. The IHCC, along with iDigBio, co-hosted a workshop the day after the Joint Meetings where invited participants completed a draft for the SPNHC Best Practices wiki relevant to herpetology and ichthyology collections. At the completion of the 2016 meetings, Mark Sabaj Perez stepped down as chair of the IHCC, and Gregory Watkins-Colwell was made new chair. The new co-chair is Sarah Huber (Virginia Institute of Marine Science) and the student co-chair is James Erdmann (Southeastern Louisiana University). Respectfully submitted, Gregory Watkins-Colwell, SPNHC representative to ASIH American Society of Plant Taxonomists I serve as an ex-officio member of the ASPT Systematics Collections Committee. The chair of the committee leads a Curator's meeting during the annual Society meeting. One of the committee goals is to promote regional networking of US herbaria, interfacing with participants in the United States Virtual Herbarium, Global Plants Initiative, and the NSF-ADBC program. The Committee has been more active than in recent years. We may resurrect an effort to revise a Best Practices document for herbarium operations, first proposed in 1958 and last revised in 1978, with new information from APHIS on permitting requirements for shipping some herbarium materials. Expected soon, this project may indeed be completed. We crafted the ASPT response to the news that the NSF Collec14 * SPNHC Connection Respectfully submitted, Rich Rabeler, SPNHC representative to ASPT Association of Registrars and Collections Specialists I was unable to attend the ARCS meeting this year. John Simmons, however, made a short presentation introducing SPNHC at the ARCS Annual Meeting in November 2015. Respectfully submitted, Annette Van Aken, SPNHC representative to ARCS Global Biodiversity Information Facility SPNHC is an organizational Associate Participant in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. James Macklin is the GBIF "Head of Delegation" for SPNHC and also currently serves as the Canadian Node Manager. GBIF has made several improvements to their cyberinfrastructure over the past year which improved searching and added some functionality. GBIF's current focus is on updating all of the data sets it harvests with a Creative Commons license including CC-zero (public), CC-BY (sharable with attribution) and CC-BY-NC (sharable with attribution; non-commercial use only) to simplify reuse and machine-readability. If you have not looked at the country-level pages I encourage you to, as they can be very informative. Numerous opportunities are also available for training at various scales as well as competitions for funding to develop new tools and methods for data mobilization, quality control, and dissemination. I encourage all members to get involved and support this critical organization! Please let James know if you have ideas for future collabora- https://www.cac-accr.ca/home http://www.gbif.org/newsroom/news/accelerating-discovery-of-biocollections-data http://www.gbif.org/newsroom/news/accelerating-discovery-of-biocollections-data

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2016