ESA 2011 Day 1 – ECN

The true ESA conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, but today marked the start of the Entomological Collections Network meeting. This is where curators and researchers of natural history collections come together and discuss new ideas or trends in the maintenance and advancement of insect collections.

The morning session was largely focused on the different programs available for specimen databasing, highlighting the similarities and advantages for a variety of different programs and testimonials from users. Ranging in price from free to several thousand dollars per year, these programs all do largely the same thing, with some room for customization depending on the curators preferences. If you’re looking at starting your own collection and are anticipating it to include many thousands or millions of specimens, then this was the symposium for you!

The afternoon started off with discussions of a relatively new movement in the insect collections community; mass imaging and digitization of specimens. By using a variety of technologies and even more databases, many institutions are striving to make virtual representations of their holdings available online so people can explore and utilize data remotely. You can learn more at the following websites:
InvertNet
NCSU Insect Collection

The North Carolina State University Entomology Lab is also running a survey to learn how entomologists and those interested in insects use the internet. You can take the survey here.

The final session of the day revolved around the practice of specimen loans, and about those researchers who may be a little slow with repatriating loaned specimens! These 4 talks were some of the most entertaining talks I’ve heard in awhile. Victoria Bayless from the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum started it off by classifying loaners from the hoarder who returns nothing and who can’t bring themselves to part with borrowed specimens to the lazy loaner who couldn’t be bothered, to the saint, the researchers who return loans promptly and include flowers! Mike Ferro also briefly discussed a new idea of a community loan wiki, showing who’s borrowed what from where. It looks like a pretty neat idea which has a lot of potential if accepted by the taxonomic community!

Next, Peter Oboyski of the Essig Museum of Entomology at Berkeley discussed some potential policies for dealing with loan requests where material will be used for molecular analyses. He made some excellent points regarding the potential destruction of specimens and how collections should demand GenBank Accession numbers for sequences from their specimens (to attach to the specimen database entry) and also raw genomic DNA if they have the facilities to properly store it.

We next heard from a confessed loan scofflaw, Zack Falin of the University of Kansas Insect Collection, who offered up some reasons why someone might not be the perfect loaner.

Mike Ivie, the curator of entomology at Montana State University finished up the session by discussing how we should all prepare our loans for the “bus” situation. This is literally a situation where a researcher dies suddenly (ie hit by a bus) leaving their loans behind for colleagues or family to sort out and return. It was certainly an excellent reminder to properly label my own loans, although it was a bit sobering hearing some of his tales of dealing with these situations himself.

A decent banquet meal with plenty of interesting discussion with other Dipterists and a few Neuropterists rounded out day 1.

The big show starts tomorrow, and I’ve got to put the final touches on my presentations for the day. Looking forward to some good talks tomorrow!