ROLES OF NATURAL-HISTORY COLLECTIONS

Natural history collections have always contained a wealth of data: ge netic and phylogenetic information stored as an inherent part of the s amples of organisms themselves, and biogeographic, ecological, and bio graphical information stored in the labels that are affixed to them. T ogether, a preserved organism and its label are a scientific specimen that has great intrinsic value. Separately, the label is a piece of pa per with meaningless inscriptions upon it, and the plant, spider, micr obe, mushroom, or bird, though carefully preserved, is just so much de ad organic matter. Natural history collections are the repository of t he vouchers for the documentation of what we know about the diversity of living things-what species exist and where, what their habitat requ irements are, what ecological associations they have with other specie s, what useful biochemical products they might generate, and who colle cted them and has studied them. Before the advent of computers, natura l history collections were physical databases from which geographic or ecological analyses and reports could be extracted by human visitatio n and transcription, usually a laborious and time-consuming task. Howe ver, such analyses are invaluable for land-use planning, pharmacognosy , conservation biology, range management, forestry, agriculture, and a host of other applications including scientific studies of the ecolog y and systematics of the species being examined. Computerization of la bel data makes such reports on distribution and ecology of species mor e readily available to potential users; they add value to the data. In terconnecting the databases brings robustness to the information that natural history collections can provide to policy-making bodies; appre ciation of robust data will lead in turn to appreciation of the collec tions from which those data were taken. Interconnectivity requires tha t collections personnel abandon competition in favor of achieving a co mmon goal: the discovery and description of the world's biota.