An official website of the United States government
The Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) currently houses nearly 580,000 specimen-lots of close to 3 million specimens of recent mollusks. It is one of the largest collections of its type in North America and, except for new donations, its collection data is entirely accessible online. The collection has grown rapidly since its founding in the early 20th century, especially in the past 50 years. While global in scope, the collection is especially strong in material from North and South America, the Caribbean, Madagascar, Pacific Ocean islands, and south Asia. Holdings have been greatly enriched by biodiversity surveys conducted by museum staff and research associates and by acquisition of relinquished institutional and private collections. Field collections often have linked voucher specimens, tissues, sequence data, and digital images. The FLMNH mollusk collection is an important resource for systematics, biogeography, biodiversity studies, and education.
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Interdisciplinary Aspirations and Disciplinary Archives: Losing and finding John M. Weatherby's Soo data
As theorized in language documentation, archives serve to make research reproducible and to make primary data accessible for multiple audiences (Himmelmann 2006; Berez-Kroeker et al. 2018). Scholars in the emerging mid-20th-century field of African history emphasized these same priorities. Mid-century Africanist historians assembled large text collections but failed in a clearly stated disciplinary project to preserve them in accessible archives. This paper explores the relationship between institutional and social factors in data preservation through the story of audio recordings and field notes documenting Soo (Uganda: Kuliak/Nilo-Saharan) collected in the mid-20th century by Makerere University history PhD student John M. Weatherby. For decades, Weatherby struggled and failed to find an institutional home for his materials, which were nearly lost amid changing disciplinary trends. I encountered them only through informal social interactions in 2018 and have subsequently been depositing them in a language archive. The slide of Weatherby’s data into obscurity shows how archiving is inherently a disciplinary practice. Institutions intending to preserve data rose and fell with changing disciplinary paradigms, but Weatherby’s data were preserved through personal relationships. Despite a common emphasis on technical and institutional initiatives for archiving, the relational contexts of legacy materials are central to their preservation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1911571
- PAR ID:
- 10376437
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language documentation and description
- Volume:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 2756-1224
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 101-139
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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