Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2017 - 11

Society Reports
your colleagues to join SPNHC and remember to renew your
membership on time!

their mutual benefit.

Respectfully submitted,
Tiffany Adrain, Chair

Jennifer has results from a new survey on workshops that
may assist LOCs with workshop topics and help SPNHC to
keep tabs on topics that need to be either repeated on a timely
basis or that represent new areas for exploration in a workshop venue.

Professional Development Committee
The Professional Development Committee met in Denver this past June.
The agenda covered five areas:
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Committee Structure and Tasks

Demo Camp

Workshops

Travel Grants and Mentorships

Wiki and Web

The PDC has working groups and subcommittees to work on these projects.
Jennifer and Jeff are taking the lead on
re-drafting the Leadership Manual for
the PDC this fall.

DemoCamp

The Demo Camp at the 2017 Denver
SPNHC Conference was a success.
Jennifer Strotman, Holly Little, and
Deborah Paul helped put together a
workshop on biodiversity informatics
for the Denver conference that complemented the Demo Camp, and may serve
as part of a new direction for Demo
Camp attendees at future conferences.

Mentorship and Travel Grants

Elise Lecompte chairs the subcommittee on Mentorship and
Travel Grants. This year's grant winners and their mentors
are James Erdmann (Jeff Stephenson), Kathryn Estes-Smargiassi (Ann Molineux), Christine Haynes (Catharine Hawks),
Stephanie Leon (Elise V. LeCompte) and Rachel Poutasse
(Elana Benamy). In addition to matching SPNHC mentors
with the annual meeting travel grant recipients, we also were
able to match a SPNHC mentor, Meghann Toner, with another new SPNHC member, Megan Ryan, who was awarded
a separate grant to attend the Denver conference.
The continued success of our Travel Grants mentorship
program, together with a great deal of enthusiasm from many
members in SPNHC for a broadened approach to mentoring
opportunities, led to a discussion on how we might identify
and implement additional ways to match professionals for

Workshops

Wiki and Web

Jennifer is doing the preliminary work with the SPNHC web
and wiki masters on setting up the PDC pages. Anna Monfils
and Kari Harris will start working on social media content for
the wiki. The initial work on the web and wiki are mid-range
and will get a start after the Leadership Manual section is
drafted.
As always, if any member of SPNHC would like to work on
any of these projects, please contact Jennifer Strotman or Jeff
Stephenson. We value and appreciate your volunteer efforts
on behalf of SPNHC and your colleagues.
Respectfully submitted,
Elise V. LeCompte, Travel Grant Subcommittee Chair
Jeff Stephenson and Jennifer Strotman, Co-chairs

Publications Committee
This will be my last note as Publications Chair and I am very pleased to
announce that Marcy Revelez will be
the new Publications Chair! She was
voted in on August 24, 2017. It has
been exciting for me to help Collection
Forum leap from print to digital, and I
look forward to seeing CoFo continue
to grow! There is so much exciting and
innovative work being done - remember to share it with your
colleagues by publishing!
Yemisi Dare and I feel our workshop on Writing for Successful Journal Publication to Promote Effective Change in Natural History Collections at the 2017 Denver SPNHC conference was successful. Attendees reported finding the workshop
useful and there was talk about holding the workshop again
in the future.
Our publications committee meeting saw some new faces
from the emerging professionals group and I hope their involvement continues! A lot may be learned from taking on a
role as a reviewer or associate editor!
I am also happy to announce a trial addition of a new section
of the newsletter, which features an institution and one or
September 2017 * 11

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2017