Welcome you today, and we'll turn things over to our host, Susan Barger. Susan, go ahead, please. Hi, everyone. This is going to be a really interesting webinar today. I looked at a lot of the videos that are in the handout, and they're very interesting. So welcome. And the best way to keep informed about what happens in Connecting to Collections Care is to join the Connecting to Collections Care community and the instructions for that you can find on our website under discussions. If you used to be in our forum, it no longer exists, or if you used to be on our listserv that no longer exists, you have to join this new community. And you can follow us on Facebook and you can like us on Twitter. Over the summer, we're not going to have any webinars until July 9th, and we're going to have a webinar then on HVAC and the preservation environment. In August, we're going to have one on fire emergencies. Right now, I just put up the advertising for our next course, which is making the most of your assessment. So those are all live, and you can join us for those. And if you're affected by flooding or any other kind of emergencies in the U.S., you can contact the National Heritage Responders. This is their 24-hour hotline. I know there's a lot of flooding all over, so yeah. Now, there was a question about when the recordings will happen, and the recordings I will put up as soon as I can, and often that's the next day. It might be a few days, it might be the same day. But the signal that shows you that the webinar recording is in the archives is that you'll no longer see the slide for it on our main page, and then you can just look in the archives and you'll find it. And it will have the slides, the recording, and handouts, and anything else we need to add. So thanks. Without further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Genevieve Tocchi, and go ahead, Genevieve. Hi, everybody. I'm Genevieve Tocchi. Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, I'm going to interrupt you a minute. If you have questions, put them in the general chat, and I will make sure that they get collected and answered when Genevieve is done. So we're going now. Bye. Thank you. Hi, I'm Genevieve Tocchi. I work at the Harvard University Herbarium. I've been working in the herbarium for a little over 15 years, and I thought that it would be nice to give everybody a really basic introduction to what an herbarium is. In the US, we say it like we would cooking herbs. So that's why it's an herbarium. But in places where you pronounce it with a hard H herb, then you would use a herbarium. You can use whatever you like. But this will be very basic. So if you already have a lot of knowledge of collections, this is probably going to feel a little bit redundant. But if you're familiar with other things and not herbaria, hopefully it will be interesting. So I thought I'd start out with a definition of what an herbarium is. You can see the OED definition there. And the thing to remember when you're talking about herbaria and when you're talking about plants in this concept, they're talking about plants in the broadest concept of the word, which is any living organism that was not an animal. So that includes fungi and things that, you know, you might not think of as plants today. And then I included a brief definition, or not that brief, of what a cryptogam is. So cryptogam, hidden gametes. So organisms that have spores, ferns have spores, but we're going to refer to them as vascular plants, and then everything else I'm going to talk about as cryptogams also have spores. It's a little bit fussy, but hopefully as we go through, you'll kind of see the different types of things I'm talking about when it comes to their physical structures. So the thing about natural history collections that are herbaria is that we, in my opinion, are much cooler than zoology collections because we have such a huge range of diversity. Zoology collections are amazing, and pretty much everything falls within animals. And you can see I put up some kind of broad maps of diversity, and you can kind of see where animals fall and that in the image on the left, all the red lines and circles are places where things fall that you might have in herbarium. And on the right, I added some of the major groups who get dikkyosilis and plants and omicoda and fungi. So we really fall all over the tree of life, which is really fun but can be really challenging. Not every institution has things that fall all over the tree of life. I'm somewhere very large. If you are somewhere very small, you may have a very small subset of things. Your things are still amazing. To be really fun, I thought before we got into dead plants, we would quick look at what some of the live plants are just because I never get to play with live plants. So for vascular plants, things that have those tubes and bundles that transport nutrients and water, here we've got a fern on the left and a pine tree on the right. So this is our basil plant. And then we have more vascular plants. We've got flowering plants, and I've got some sedges and palm trees. So these are all kind of fun things that exist in the vascular plant group. You can have bryophytes. Bryophytes are in the plant kingdom, but these are considered cryptogams. They're non-vascular plants. They don't have those transporting bundles. We've got a liverwort. We've got a moth here. We've got algae. Algae actually fall across multiple kingdoms because green algae are plants, but brown algae fall into a different group. And then diatoms are microscopic.  So even though we talk about algae like they're one thing, their diversity in the tree of life is actually really huge. We've got fungi. There are, of course, lots of microscopic fungi, but I thought a really charismatic cup fungi in a beautiful bully would be a nice thing to remind everyone about. Lichens are a group of fungi but that have symbiotic relationships with either algae or cyanobacteria. So there's complications with collections with those because their names are also based on non-laconized fungi collection. So there's some tricky things with that, but they look very different than most of what you think of as fungi. Oh, mycota or blight. So this is late blight on potatoes. So this is what caused the Irish potato famine. It used to be considered part of true fungi, and they're not anymore, but this is a common thing that you might have, especially if you have any plant pathogens in collections. And then mycodes or slime molds are actually protists that come together to form a single adorable little organism with spores. They're one of my favorites. And then you'll have things that are actually true bacteria. We have myxobacteria, which you see on the left, because we have the collections of someone that kind of did the initial work on them. Those would be unusual. However, on the right is cyanobacteria, which used to be called blue-green algae. So that is commonly found in herbaria that have algae materials. So you've got all these different types of organisms. What can you use them for? Traditionally, people think of herbaria work as being taxonomy, kind of the classification of naming and organizing of botanical materials. And that is still a huge part of what happens in herbaria, but it's not the only thing. And I kind of just put up some examples of some other ways that materials from herbaria can be used. You can basically use them for anything. An important thing to think about, though, is some collections are not really active anymore, so they might be static. But lots of places get the question, well, why should we keep adding material? And the way I like to phrase it is that if you stop adding new collections, then you're only a snapshot in time, and that snapshot ends. You don't get to continue to kind of have that view of the botanical world over time, and that can limit what research might be able to be done. And because we don't know what questions people are really going to ask, we kind of limit what answers they can get if we stop expanding our collections. So working in the herbarium. So I would say that if you work in any museum collection or natural history collection, it's the same duty that it's our duty to maintain and preserve and make accessible these research collections as well as keep them up to date, which is a lot of work. And this is true whether you only have 50 or 100 specimens or whether you're like Q here. This is an image from Q Botanic Gardens in England who has 7 million specimens. The scale of work is different, and some of the needs are different, but it's the same job of maintaining and preserving and making things accessible. Overall, I'm not going to talk about very specific archival details, just like in any museum setting. So more archival materials you can use the better. Acid-free paper, cotton rag paper, archival glue, archival tissue paper, bags that are polypropylene, but not everyone has the money for that, and that's okay. And we all just do our best. I mean, even institutions with really large budgets can't always afford to get the perfect storage material for everything. So I would say if your budget is limited, always just do your best to try to protect your specimens as much as possible. And if you can make sure that your labels are in really good paper if you're generating labels, that will really serve you well in the long term. So what's this whole label thing? So it's kind of starting in a weird place, but I would say that in an arbarium, and in most natural history collections, the label is really as important as that biological material. Without a label, you don't know anything about what you have. You don't know what it is. You don't know how to organize it. You don't know where it came from. You don't know when it's from. So here I've got some information about a few of the things that you find on labels that are common. You get determinations, which is a taxon name. You get who collected it, hopefully their number, because that helps keep track of which things are what. You get dates. You get locations. On more modern collections, you get coordinates like latitude and longitude. You can get elevations. You can get all sorts of things. And on the right, we've got an example of what we consider to be a very detailed label. This is from a fabulous researcher and collector that now works for the USDA, but he always includes lots and lots of information because he never knows what people might want to use things for in the long run. So if you're going to work in an herbarium and all these things have labels, you have to be able to read a label, which sounds like it should be straightforward, but it's not always straightforward. So I have an example of an old label with handwriting and scarce data and a new label with really rich data. Just to kind of show you how different they can be and how hard it can be to figure out what you're looking for. The more you do it, the more you learn how to parse. Oh, this is my tax on name. Oh, no, this is my location. This is not my habitat. Oh, this is the collector and the collector number. Oh, here's the date. And it just takes a lot of practice. So I highlighted some of the different things that you see on the labels and kind of where they are for these examples to kind of help if you don't have much experience reading labels and you can kind of dive into that in the future if you need to look at that. So I want to talk about the next big chunk of things that I'm going to talk about are the different ways the physical biological material is prepared. And we'll talk about the different ways vascular plants and the cryptogams, the non-vascular cryptogams, are prepared. You can see that there's basically the same list on each side there in a different order. So there's a lot of similarities. What I'm not going to talk about at all are genetic collections collected in silica gel or any DNA products or any other ways genetic collections are done like CTAB. They're a totally separate set of challenges and it's outside the scope of what we're going to talk about and it's outside the scope of what many small places have. Cryo storage of fresh tissue and DNA products is also entirely different. And we're not going to talk about it at all. And I actually have zero experience with it. This is a facility next door. Cryo storage can be incredibly dangerous if not regulated carefully. So if it's at your institution, there are lots of other resources out there on it. And I suggest looking at those. But for today, we're going to pretend it doesn't even exist. So I've mentioned a little bit, vascular plant versus cryptogams. And if you work in a herbaria, you will know that sometimes there's literally a wall between the vascular plants and cryptogams. Sometimes the vascular plant and cryptogams, people don't want to talk to each other, which is not always the case. And vascular plant researchers and cryptogamic researchers are all really wonderful people. But the question is, are they really so different to curate? Is it really this us versus them camp? And in some ways, no, they're absolutely the same to work with. And in other ways, they are absolutely different to work with. So that's kind of how these challenges arose. It's that people focus on the differences instead of the similarities. So the mean difference between working physically with a plant specimen and a cryptogamic specimen is that with a plant specimen, you can see almost everything you need to to identify the organism with a hand lens or a simple swing arm dissecting scope. Every once in a while, you need to get up closer. There are certain groups that people need to do SEM for, or they might need to pull apart a flower and look at parts more closely, or they need to look at pollen. But for the most part, you can still do all that with the normal way that a plant is prepared, which is stuck to a piece of paper. With most cryptogams, you need to look at them, not just under a dissecting scope, but you need to look at them microscopically, which often involves making sections and using stains and kind of doing this really fine micro manipulation. And if those were glued down to pieces of paper or they're substrate, it makes them almost impossible to work with. So that's kind of the biggest reason that these are handled separately. So we're going to start with vascular plants and we're going to talk about their main preparation methods. Almost all vascular plant herbarium specimens are mounted on sheets of paper. In much of the world, the sheets have a standard size. I gave it an inches. It translates into centimeters, and almost everywhere in the world uses the exact same size paper to mount their plants, which means if you're a collector, you know how big to make your specimen. There are some places that have larger and some places that have smaller, but overall, it's the same. Usually you have a plant. You have a single label. You have a stamp or some sort of mark that indicates who owns this specimen. You may have an identifier that's used for your database or spreadsheet or how you capture any information digitally. And then a lot of newer specimens will also have a packet on them, so you can put any loose material in them for ability to use DNA later or material that is falling off the sheet or that you can't secure well. Sometimes instead of one specimen and one label on a sheet, you can have multiple specimens and multiple labels on a sheet. On the right-hand side, you can kind of see that there are two barcodes and two are labeled in each lower corner. And that's because there were two different collections mounted on this one sheet. Sometimes it's done because the person doing the work really wants them to be that close because the comparison to understand what's going on is really complicated. More commonly in older institutions, it's because paper was very expensive. It's expensive now. It was much more expensive in the 1800s. So if you really had small material and you were trying to save space, you might put multiple things on one piece of paper. So in working in your collection, it's important to pay attention to that. And they may not still be the same species, so you may need to put notes in your collections to say, oh, well, we have more of this over in this other place. You should go look there. Another thing that you can get with sheets, on the right here, you can't really see exactly, but this is actually, I believe it's a rubis, so something in the Blackberry and Raspberry family. And they have these very long kind of botanical structures. They've got all these vines and climbers. So in order to get all the information you need, you may end up collecting more than we'll fit on one sheet. So this actually has the same label, and it actually says sheet one of two and sheet two of two. But you can have three sheets, 15 sheets, 25 sheets. And either kind of keep them together within your collection is helpful. Some things are too big to put on sheets at all, or they're too fragile or they're too sharp. So you might put them in boxes. You might have small boxes of things that you keep separate, or you might have really large boxes of things that you keep together. So I've got the small image is a cactus, right, which cactus is pretty three-dimensional. It's hard to get flat, so that's in a box. And then on the right, that's a palm. So a palm frond is often just too big, and the palm fruits are too big to put on a sheet of paper. You can also use bags to store these really large things. The image on the left is at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, and they have these giant, beautiful palm fronds in bags, and they actually have them hanging on clothes hangers.  You can also use bags to store whole oversized things like the cactus in the middle, or on the right, those are just acorns where you couldn't fit all of them on your sheet with your primary collection. Jars are another way you may have some material stored for vascular plants. It's generally not the entire specimen. On the left here, these are orchid flowers. So these are actually removed from a specimen usually, and then they were hydrated by a researcher. And once they've been hydrated and looked at, you can put them in ethanol to preserve them over time so another researcher can look at them later because you don't want to just throw away your orchid flower or any of your important materials. On the right, we've got some larger things. These are in our economic botany collection where probably you didn't necessarily need to have your pineapple tickled, but if you were collecting in a tropical area and you had no way to dry your material and you really wanted to see the 3D structure, so putting it in a liquid collection can be really helpful. Slides. Slides are something that you may have a lot of or you may have none of. The most common types of slides, I would say are slides of sections of wood or buds or nodes of things. You may have slides of leaf sections or of pollen. Those are kind of the most common slides, and those are generally fixed in something like Canada Baltimore. They're solidly mounted. The top there is actually an orchid flower that's just preserved in glycerin and sitting on just a piece of glass as a slide, which is less common. Now people generally put those in liquid collections, but some of you may have these really amazing historical collections, and historically that was a way that orchid flowers were preserved. And last, the preparation of self. I think anyone who's worked in a collection of any kind has dealt with this, where there's no specific way that it's prepared. It's not a fix to something. It's not put in a specific type of mount. It might go in a tray or a drawer, but just the piece on its own. This is an example from some of our fossil collections. Not all herbaria have fossils, and we actually carry the collections very differently. So it's not, because it's not a standard herbarium practice, we're not going to go into details about fossils today, but I thought they looked really fabulous. If you look, let's see if I can use this pointer. I can use this pointer. If you look right here, you can kind of see that this is a leaf, this is the mid-rib on the leaf here, and here's the edge. And I just thought that was a really fun thing to see. So, it's one thing to have your plants already on sheets, which is what will happen with your existing collections. But what about material that hasn't been processed yet or where you're getting new material in or you open up a box and you've got a whole bunch of material that's old and has been sitting around? Usually it will come in newspaper with a label and all the information. There can be other parts of the material that wouldn't go on a sheet. And usually the putting of these on sheets that's mounting is the job of whoever gets the material, right? If you're going to own it, then it's your archival material and your kind of ownership practices that are going to be used. You know, and one of the fun things to do is with new materials you can get new newspapers. But sometimes you can have really fun, amazing old newspapers to look at as you kind of go through this material, which we found some pretty great stuff. So, mounting vascular plants is a really big deal. And I put a big section of a whole bunch of different links in the handout. And the herbarium handbook has a lot of information. The herbarium handbook has a lot of information about everything. It really is kind of like a one-stop shop for what you need to know about working in a herbarium. And if you work in a collection and you don't have it and you need a hold of it, I would highly recommend it. Mounting has a couple of universals. Usually you put the label down at the bottom right.   But from there, there's a lot of variability. There's a couple of things I'm personally going to recommend.  And certain groups of plants tend to have lots of roots with them. And a lot of the guys, they recommend always having the roots at the bottom of the sheet because it gives you a better gestalt. However, if you always have your bulky material in the same genus or the same plant family on the bottom of the sheet, then it's going to get really, really bulky. And then it can be very hard to file your collection. So if you have certain families or genera that you know you have a bunch in your collection and you don't want it to be too bulky, I would actually kind of alternate which end of the sheet you put your roots on. The other thing I recommend is not gluing orchids to the sheet itself because in order to study orchids you have to remove flowers and rehydrate them. You have to do these three-dimensional floral structures. And if you glue them to the sheet, it's basically impossible to get them off without damaging them. So those aren't necessarily in any of the resources. So those are things that I haven't encountered personally and that we do here. And this is an example of an orchid specimen. You can see all the little lines of gums, linen, tape. And if you look carefully, let's say right here, it's a little hard to see. The petal is actually lifting off of the paper a little bit there. So it's not glued down at all. So if somebody needed to use it, we could just trim the little bits of linen tape holding just that one flower down and rehydrate it. Okay. So this is a shot just of some of the supplies that our mounters use. I made a list of some supplies that our mounters use. Mounting is different in every place and people feel very strongly about how mounting has been done at each of their places. I will say that if you can afford more archival products, the longer your material will last. But as I said at the beginning, we all just do the best we can. So after we handle vascular plants, I'm going to talk a little bit about these preparations for the non-vascular cryptogames. Most vascular plants are mounted on sheets in a huge portion of collections. The cryptogames are put in folded paper packets. The packet size has some variability based on the institution and how they store things. There are archival supply places that have pre-made packets that you can buy. Lots of places will fold their own. For crumbly specimens, you can also have a paper inner packet inside, which keep everything secure. But because they're not glued to anything, it's very easy for people to take things out and do any microscopy they need to do or other types of studies they need to do. There are cryptogames mounted directly to sheets. Macro algae are the most common thing. Algae actually produce substances that affix themselves to paper. So usually algae will come mounted in some way to you instead of loose because the practice floats them onto paper as you collect them and then they glue themselves to the paper. Sometimes other things like very large mosses are mistaken for vascular plants and then they're mounted onto sheets, but that's not really purposeful. Cryptogames will have a lot of slides. We talked about slides a little bit for vascular plants and how they're usually parts of another original piece of material. There are lots of microscopic organisms in the cryptogamic groups. So this slide is of a type of fungus that is an ectoparasite on an insect. This slide has the entire piece of fungus or possibly many pieces of fungus. So dealing with it means that this entire organism is on the slide so you don't have anything else. The other thing that is different is most cryptogamic slides are not mounted in a permanent fixed medium like balsam and they're now synthetic things. Diatoms are, however, most of the other groups, especially fungi, are not. So these are very fragile over time and I included some resources about recommendations for how these can be sealed now because the practices over the past 40ish, 50ish years is very non-stable. And it's a lot of work or impossible to curate them without the expertise of someone who works in that group of organisms and that kind of preservation method. Lots of institutions have all of their fleshy fungi in boxes and not packets. Boxes protect them from getting squished and can be uniform in size. They do take up a lot of space so you kind of need to have a way to organize some so it's meant to keep in mind if you're not sure what you need to do is assess in your space. And then some fungi have lots and lots of spores so regardless of how you're storing them, boxes or packets, you may want some sort of barrier so when you open whatever they're in spores don't come out in a giant cloud. We also use bags and jars with cryptogams both have advantages and disadvantages. Jars are usually used in more historic settings though there are some very small and aquatic fungi that are still preserved in spirit media. Bags can be very useful for your collections but it's the sort of thing that you really don't want to just use plastic bags from the store if you can avoid it because they'll break down very, very quickly and if you have something with a lot of spores bags can be very static-y so keep that in mind. So we've talked about how everything is physically prepared. Why don't we take a quick breather and do our next poll? Do I do that? Does Susan do that? Oh, we've lost my sound. My phone didn't hang out. Oh, okay. Can we do the next poll? Can I do that? Do you do that? Let's see. There we go. Why doesn't everybody do this next poll? There's a lot of options. This is a lot of fun. We've got a pretty good split between people who've worked with botany collections or are familiar with botany collections and who work outside of botany collections. So that's really fun. Thanks, everybody. It's probably got most of everyone's responses. Perfect. So we've got all these specimens and they're in packets and on sheets and all these things. So now what do we do with them? There's no one right answer for that but I'm going to go over what some of the common solutions are. So the main goal is that you want to have these things available in perpetuity, essentially. You always want them to be preserved.  And there's all different potential regulations depending on where you are and what you have. And I'm not going to be able to cover that for everybody but I would say that the big picture is if you can keep them safe and you can find them then you're winning. So here's some weird hiccups here.  So you've got specimens that are on sheets which are then in folders which are then in some sort of cabinetry. Or you've got packets in drawers or on sheets. So those are kind of your most common ways things are stored and as you can see there's a lot of overlap that can happen and that I'm not an informational designer. So if you have packets you can put them on sheets. There's lots of ways to do that. Many people that come visit my institution are shocked because we actually do use drape pins like you would in sewing to put them on the sheets. You can actually, it's a little hard to see but right here in that circle those are pins so we go right through the paper to affect them to the sheet. And we do that because as names change and we move things around it means that we don't have to worry about our paper is breaking down over time. You can move things and repin things many, many, many times but it's not practical for everyone. So once you've got all these sheets you've got plant specimens on sheets and algae on sheets and packets on sheets. What do you do with them? Usually you put them in folders. In herbaria the main archival or heavyweight folder is called a genus cover usually because you're storing things at a genus level and then you often have thinner paper inside to separate out species. So these are called species covers and generally you want to keep things fairly level in your folders. You don't want them to be very bulky. This one's a little bit bulky actually but it's full of pine so that's usually what happens with certain groups. There are these kind of outrageously interesting folders that have all these extra flaps to them that you can do for bulky items or loose items but I don't actually have any photos of those but those are popular at other institutions. Boxes, you've got large boxes. You can put small boxes in your large boxes. You can put folders in your large boxes. You can put bags in your large boxes. Sometimes your boxes at this level are archival. Sometimes they're not quite archival they're just as close as you can get and your archival boxes are very expensive. And then from there everything can go into something like an herbarium cabinet. Herbarium cabinets are a common way to store specimens. The folders can go right in. Boxes can go right in. They are very expensive. All museum cabinetry is very expensive. The new ones have these really great gaskets to help keep out pests and can protect things from flooding but you can also have open compactors which then usually still has some gasketing but no doors so it all depends on your space and what you have. And sometimes large institutions when they're remodeling will get rid of old cabinets and will post that on things like the herbaria listserv and will, you know, if you can go get them you can have them. So if you're looking for cabinetry and have a low budget that's a good place to keep an eye out. Here's an image where you can see lots of boxes interfiled with folders and this is actually in our compactors. There's no doors there but there's some rubber gasketing. So you can see that you can kind of get everything in together in a flow if that's what you want to do with your collection. Some people want all their boxes in one place separate. Some people want to intermix them depending on which groups they're working with. You can do either. There's no wrong answer for that. Open shelves are another thing that happens. We don't have this for our main herbarium collections here but for example Q has it for their mycology collections and you can see the boxes on the lower right. So they're in good boxes on open shelves in a climate control space. At the Singapore herbarium they had everything in boxes on shelves in a climate control space but because of the higher risk for predation by museum pass because they're in a tropical climate they actually had custom made plastic bins and there's information about that on the handout. I haven't asked them how that is for a microclimate in each box but for those interested in conservation that's an important question to ask before you go down that route. In addition to putting packets on sheets lots of places will just leave them as they are. They have all their packets to be more or less the same size so they can go upright in boxes and you can either put those in boxes that fit in your herbarium cabinet so that's what you have or you might have cabinets with drawers on the lower right there. That's the Missouri Botanical Garden which has a huge, huge bryophyte collection and they have everything in drawers there and it can be very, very effective. The drawers and packets upright are most common for bryophytes and lichens because they tend to be easiest to work with that way and they're usually not very bulky so they're more uniform to work with. Jumping a little bit, sorry. You also can have jars and spirit collections so depending on what liquid is in your jar depends on what you need to do based on your local fire codes and health and safety regulations. If it's a flammable substance in any volume you're probably going to have specialized cabinets and you'll have to kind of see at your institution and in your specific area what the regulations are. And then for very large things you will probably want some place to put oversized materials. We have special cabinets. We have a very large collection of large rocks and lichens on them, mostly collected in Antarctica and they were too heavy to put in our regular cabinets easily so we got specialty cabinets for them. Other places you can see on the lower left that's at the Bishop Museum and that's Barbara Kennedy with Tandana fruits and those are very large and very heavy so you can't fit those into a regular cabinet. Slides are hard to store no matter who you are and how many or few you have. Even if you can afford the latest date of the art museum cabinets it can be very, very challenging because really the best practice for slides is not just to store them flat but just store them flat with the cover slip below and hanging so there's no pressure on that in between medium and basically no, nothing is designed that way. So flat and upright is common. You can store them hanging if you have wooden slide boxes and you have them all tipped the right way but then you're organizing all these wooden slide boxes so no matter what you do with slides they're important and a really big challenge. So storage is just how we keep specimens and it feeds into how we might organize them but it can also go the other way. There's a lot of systems of organization for both vascular plants and cryptohams for vascular plants there's much clear systems of organization that have been practiced I would argue. Other people might not argue that but that's okay. But the thing is that it really depends on what your resources are and how much you know. If you have very knowledgeable staff or access to other local staffs or regional staffs or if you have access to certain literature that may not be free then you may have an easier time than a collection that doesn't have experience in these things but even without experience you can do a great job taking care of things as long as you are careful and you document and you follow a plan just like in any collection. So I said this before but and we say this here all the time especially in the part of the building I work with mostly which is the cryptogenic collection is that if you can find the material that the researcher needs you win. There's a lot of different ways to organize things and oftentimes no matter which way you pick somebody will be disappointed. It might be the curator, it might be the collections manager, it might be the staff, it might be the visiting researcher but the key is doing what works best for your specific institution. If you cater almost exclusively to visiting researchers then you want it to be easiest for them to use things. If you cater exclusively to just a handful of staff needing to do everything as quickly as possible then it may be a different organizational scheme. I would say that the next most important thing is being able to find your specimens is finding how you want to be organizing them and have it be a set way to organize them. If you know anything about nomenclature and taxonomy you know that there are many websites which I have a bunch listed for you on the handout that talk about the names of things and how naming works and there's all different statuses for names and you can go to these websites and you can find out what the most current name is for almost any organism. But that might have changed two weeks ago and it might change again in two weeks or two months. And nobody has time to be checking this all the time and constantly putting all of their material under the newest name because you want to have all of the organisms that are the same thing together and that one thing could have 50 different names applied to it over time. So finding what sets of things are going to be your guide for what you're using for filing specimens is going to be really important. It might be a regional flora. It might be a worldwide treatment. There's a group of fungi known as the smut fungi the eustelaginaleas and there's one book that was put out within the past 10 years that deals with basically every single taxon so that's a really great resource. It's not useful for most collections because most collections don't have a lot of eustelaginaleas but it's a fabulous book. So you just have to have what you decide and once you decide it, it can change later but just make sure you have really clear documentation about what you've chosen. So the three main ways to organize vascular plants are either alphabetically, phylogenetically, or numerically. We're going to go through them in that order. The first one and the last one are straightforward. The middle one is a little bit complicated especially to people that don't work in natural history. So I would say that no matter how you organize things you really need to have fabulous staff and to really take care of them and so I'm trying not to carefully look at your cat but someone mentioned something about dangerous specimens so here I mentioned specimens may be hazardous depending on where you are and what groups you work in you may have some different levels of irritants and hopefully you have some local researchers or curators or experts that can help make sure the outside of the cabinets are labeled we actually had a section of our collection that we went in and bagged specifically and had warnings on. There are certain genus in the Fabaceae, the legume family that the fruits can have hairs and they're not just stinging hairs so they have a toxin in them so they can be really dangerous if you get them under your skin or if you open a folder quickly and they fly out you can get them near eyes so we really do take care to make sure that our collection staff is protected and visitors are protected and we do the same thing when we check incoming material to make sure that our mountiers are protected because not everyone knows what could be hazardous though most specimens over time the worst thing kind of fade out so poison ivy and things like that and the anaphrotic ac most things the irritants don't last over time so it's not a problem so alphabetic you can either put everything into families and then do those alphabetically and then within the family have the genus and species alphabetically or if you don't have the resources to put everything into families you can just alphabetize by genus and then species that is not a popular opinion especially among researchers in large collections because it means that your material that is most closely related and similar to each other is not going to be next to each other and as names change and things go back and forth that can be a little bit tricky but if it's what works for you because you don't have the botany resources or experience then that's fine if you're going to use families you still need to have your resources for what families you're using and what things go into those families and even if you're going to do things alphabetic then I would still say have your vascular plants versus your non-vascular cryptogam separate so you want to keep your major group separately if at all possible phylogenetic is the idea that you're filing things in families in the order that it is believed they evolved in from earliest evolution through most recent evolution so things early on are things like a podium firms and things at the far end are in the asteraceae, the aster family there is a current version of this the angiosperm phylogeny group EPG it's online and they have a linear arrangement so you can go through and do that and there are also linear arrangements for the more basal groups because angiosperms are flowering plants so that doesn't include your pine trees and your farms no matter what you're going to need references there are links in the handout to more historical versions of these arrangements that a lot of collections had and then they kind of would update through time so no collection is perfect or static or the same so on the left here you can see we've got a folder and there's a number and there's a family on it except it's the old family name so things change over time compositing is the asteraceae we have numbers for things and then you can see those folders and things on them so those are those species covers I mentioned before and that we put everything from one species in those so you could have multiple specimens per little folder there to help you organize them and make it easier when you're looking for material on the right these are all corkis oak trees in the Fagaceae and they're all from our United States and Canada region and then we have it's kind of hard to see there but we actually then have pencil dawn the range of states in each one so you can really break things down by geography if you have a lot of material most collections have some sort of geographic region name the last way is to have a numeric system so some places have a static system where it's not that anything is filed together but things are assigned a number in a catalog or a card file where that number goes and it will never move I would argue that if you don't already have this collection this is probably not the way to do it because it's a lot of work for everybody except for when you go to put it away you know if it comes back from alone or being used by a researcher you always know where it goes but other than that it's a lot of work to maintain I would say that one of the only types of collections of this works really really well for our slide collection because you don't want to be rearranging whether that's a big pain or if you have artifacts so some herbaria also have economic botany collections of artifacts and you may do things by number because artifacts don't have a set shape or size or way they are organized in your organization where everything we've been talking about is related to the names of the organisms the taxon names there's a type of taxonomy hybrid so that's when you don't have we have an organism that you know has multiple parents hybrids can have names that are published according to the taxonomic code or they can be things where people know this specimen you have is a hybrid and they know what the parents are but it's not a published name if you are in a collection and you have no idea what I'm talking about and you probably have hybrids that's okay there's an X it's not the letter X it's either a name or on the label and you can either file if you know if you understand hybrids and you can get a handle on them then you can file named hybrids alphabetically with the other species or you can put all the hybrids together at the end of a genus usually the end and not a beginning I would argue the only wrong way to handle hybrids is to file them alphabetically under X because it's not an X and it's just gonna confuse people and look for things so that would be the only thing I would recommend again doing for hybrids after you organize by your alphabet or your phylogenetic order and then your alphabet and you have your genus your genera and your species you probably will have enough material you may have enough material that you want to organize things by some sort of geographic breakdown regional herbarium might do it by or cities depending on the size of the collection and they may say oh well everything outside of here is all going together and there's other category global herbaria will have all these other regions and each global herbaria will have a different type of region so you can't just say oh I'll just do what everyone else does because there's nothing that everyone else does we all make up our own geographic breakdown which stresses your collection you know holding is a kind of great out rough idea of the map that we're using and you can see that for us Africa is a really large region even though Africa has a very diverse flora but our buildings holdings of Africa are not as diverse but if you go somewhere like Q Q has a really diverse holding of African plants so they actually break it down into a whole bunch of regions so nowhere does it the exact same way I feel for what's best for your collection types I'm not sure if people are familiar with types and I did not do a poll related to types so types are the individuals for which a name is based so it's the physical objects you can go back to when you're trying to understand a taxonomic comment and say well when this is very first published this was the physical thing they were talking about is what I have is it this physical thing so I think almost everyone stores them under the Bayesian name there may be places that don't do that but I would argue that storing it under the Bayesian name is the best place to store it Bayesian name is a complicated concept you can read about it in the International Code of Nomenclature but basically it is the first name that the organism was published under and therefore because it was the first name you can go back to it versus if you put it in any of the other names that it was moved to you can have it in many places and it's very challenging depending on where you are and what you have there's two really large strategies for storing types and one is to keep all of your types together you may still have alphabetical by genus or by family and then genus but they're all in one place if you don't have a lot of money for really good cabinets you might invest in your cabinetry for your types because they're so important if the Bishop Museum was telling me that they keep their types in a special room and they have a fire suppression system for it but also when they've had pest problems in the other part of the collection because this part of the collection is so separate and not regularly accessed those specimens are better protected from things like pest predation so it's common especially in tropical places but if we don't do that and other collections don't do that and instead they'll put everything for maybe a whole family together in one place at the beginning or the end of the family alphabetically so that way it's kind of with the organisms that are being studied so it's a little bit easier for researchers but you don't have the same level of access control to the collection it really depends on your size and your scope and the more you can do to protect them the better so this is what it looks like in our collections a little bit this is a family on the right you can see all these red folders those are what our type folders look like our old type folders so all our types are in red so they're easy to find and they're at the end of the family and you can see kind of various colored folders before that because those are we do family and then we do genus and then the different colored folders are for different geographic regions and then we have species within that so some of our cabinets are all one color when you open them up but this one is kind of a fun example of all the different ways you can break things down so if you're looking for oh I know I'm looking for this genus and I'm looking for it from the West Indies then I need that blue folder right there that dark blue folder not the light blue folder organizing ancillary collections is a challenge no matter how you do it the easiest system you can figure out that works with your space is best if the ancillary collections belong or part of something from a sheet or another thing I would say that making sure that the original object has a note that says where you should go look for additional material is really important if your ancillary collections are filed by their taxonomy then you need to make sure that if the taxonomy in the main part of your collection gets updated that any specimens in the ancillary collection also get updated because if they don't then finding them later becomes very challenging and you can have this highly mismatched system of bits and pieces of the same object mixed collections are something that I love and deal with a lot they're very very common in cryptogams this is an example this is a sphagnum which is a moss and on it is growing a wee little slime mold that's a fissurum of some sort and if you were a biologist you might care about the sphagnum and if you are interested in mixing my sheets you would care about the slime mold but so does that make one more important than the other? it doesn't and even if you care more about one someone will care about the other so having a way to approach how you deal with these is important and here you can see that it would be impossible to mix those off that bright light and it's even more pronounced when you're dealing with things like lichens on rocks that are fixed to rocks you can't always split that rock or divide those lichens up so you really need a way to track physically in your collection as well as if you have your data stored digitally how you're going to go back and forth to find these and I would say anyway you can think of doing it I would personally argue that the only way that I would say is wrong that's a strong term but I would say it's wrong to basically say that one organism doesn't matter at all that's really being very biased bringing all your prejudices in so making a note at least somewhere that's specific about what the other taxa are is really important so we talked a lot about different ways to organize vascular plants and the thing is that cryptogams are actually much more complicated to organize and we're going to talk about that much less because they're so complicated to organize there's no easy treatment there's no easy guide there's no just go ahead and do this published list there's no cryptogamic phylogeny group because they're not an allied group so you kind of just have to really assess what you have and think about what might work best for you fungi are incredibly diverse and there's no easy way to think about them places we'll divide them into morphological groups that's how we have things people divide them just much more broadly based on whether they fall into ascomycota or basidiomycota using divisions from what I've been looking at using divisions would be a really solid way to do it because that's more stable than some of the lower things like families families and fungi are not a great way to organize anything I would say do not organize your fungi by families for some places we'll do all their fungi alphabetical by genus but that's very challenging based on all the different types of fungi there are and how people study them so I think if you can do it by something like division and then alphabeticals that will actually make your life easier in the long run plant pathogens often the host is as important as everything else so hosts are sometimes in additional way things are sub organized lichens are fungi with a symbiotic relationship most places if they can we'll store their lichens separately and usually alphabetical by genus I would also argue that lichen families are not as stable as you might want them to be to organize them by family if you are in a collection and you have no way for anyone to know whether something is a lichen or a fungus because the nomenclature is handled the same you could inter-file them researchers are not going to like it people that I'm talking to right here are not going to like it but it's it's really an important thing if you don't have any other way to separate them algae you can divide it into major color groups or you can do them alphabetical mosses and hepatic are best if you can keep them separate and usually you can tell those apart if you look up the names on any of the bryocyte websites it will tell you which group it's in and pretty much anything you'd have in a cryptogamic herbarium kind of falls within one disease even if it's not a fungus usually it was treated like a fungus and no matter what you do someone is going to be mad at what you do to just pick what works best for your collection and stand by it researchers are going to put annotations on your specimens that either say this was wrong in the first place or it's because something a whole group was changed you're going to have to update your collection unless you're filing numerically you're going to have to put things in their new home based on these new names for when something was wrong you may or may not want to put a note in your collection to say oh there used to be a thing here now it's in this other place if you're applying a large treatment I would definitely say you want to put information in the old place to say okay all these taxis used to be here and now they're in this other place it really makes things easier when you're looking for specimens provisions are complicated groups are in flux and sometimes if you have everything digital some of it you can apply in the back end and some of it you can say oh well everything moves from point A to point B but it's just not always that straightforward sometimes a taxon gets split based on geography or substrate sometimes things get lumped sometimes a taxon is good in one continent and not in another continent so just the more breadcrumbs you can leave yourself and the more stable the treatments you can use it's really going to make your life easier so we've got all this stuff what do we do with it why do we have it what are the ways we interact with other researchers and institutions so one of the most common things that institutions will send loans usually only to other officially recognized institutions you can find out about that on index to bariorum it's just like in any museum collection where you're going to want letters and documentation about what's going on and for most places it's a pretty standard policy that they will allow loans you'll have to have specific determinations about whether you can send the loan to a certain location or country and whether it's in your budget or not because usually it's the sending institutions the original institutions job to pay to send the loan and the other institutions job to pay to return the loan so it's true that budget is part of it and people requesting loans will understand that we track things via paperwork and digital records and we actually have ledgers I would argue that you can't have too many copies of things just in case having an official form with a number that other institution can track and you can track really helps make everything easier to keep track of the materials and I would suggest that whenever you remove materials to send on loan or to send on exhibit that you put a note in the collections that makes it really easy for people to see what materials are missing either because they're looking for those specimens or because they think it's a whole bunch of space so they can put something else in the same thing happens you might need material in for researchers you're also going to want to keep lots of paperwork and information most institutions have a loan policy of a year and will grant extensions try to be timely in your return try to make sure that your researchers have annotated the specimens your loans are to institutions no matter what your researchers are telling you about what they want to do it is the job of the institution to protect those specimens I would say most people that work in collections have dealt with accessioning or are familiar with accessioning it's the same in herbaria where you need to take your legal ownership you need to have really good records paper ledgers aren't always used anymore but I would say that they're a great way to make sure that you've got books in a row keeping copies of any permits and permission forms and letters is really important and if you're unfamiliar with the Nagoya protocol and you're in natural history you should probably take a peek at that it has to do with the ability of scientists in various countries being allowed to use specimens depending on their permitting and you really need to have an acquisition and accession plan so that way you can really assess what the materials are here's a quick list of permits you can look at this closely later but basically there are global permits that everyone needs to think about and there are US specific permits that are national permits there may be local permits I'm sure there are other country specific permits and you just kind of have to really know who do I need to worry about what I need to do and are there places in the collections that these are so important that I want to leave a note that says these are regulated you need to make sure that this is the rule set that you follow people throw around the term digitization and it can mean a lot of different things usually people currently you're talking about having specimen data as well as images of the specimens there's a huge push for this globally even though it's a lot of work and costs a lot of money but there's a lot of portals online that you can use to share your data and it really helps foster collaboration there are data management systems that help with all the aspects of work in herbaria but really if that's not within your means but you can get your data into a spreadsheet to share with people or keep track of for yourself or use some of these free online portals Symbiota hosts a lot of different portals so that's great because the more you can share your data the more you can get people helping you by using your data and giving you additional information back this is an example of one of our photo stations that we built in house but having a way to take images of these large sheets that are bulky or cumbersome is challenging but taking pictures can also save you in the long run because then you don't have to send specimens to people you can send images however image storage is an issue for everyone because storage is money so we're going to do really quick past your collections are delicious and the best way to protect them is through integrated past management you want to have best practices as best you can I would say a lot of herbaria that have the resources freeze everything that comes in the door you went out alone for a week it doesn't matter you're getting frozen new material from another institution you're getting frozen you were sitting out on the counter for two weeks you're getting frozen it really just helps preventively protect your collections and there's more information about this in the handout and there's a lot of information on museumpass.net and really IPM in herbaria it's a whole talk in itself but I would definitely say that do as much as you will stay on top of and not more if you're going to do something and it feels good at first and you know in a long time you end up dropping everything do less and watch more and that is everything thank you that was very long sorry so I think we have time for some questions yeah we have a few questions I'm also going to put up two polls that we didn't cover and I'm also going to put up our evaluation link the evaluations are really important so please take a minute and fill one out after we leave today okay so the first question Dasha Horton said are efforts ever made to separate two different specimens that are mounted on the same archival sheet or does that put the specimen in too much danger slide about and that's referring to your earlier slide with two specimens yeah so we've done both and it depends on who's in charge at the time and the thing is you can absolutely separate them and in some ways that makes your life easier but then you lose that piece of history and you can never get it back and sometimes people of archival it doesn't matter because they were just saving paper and then sometimes they say like well how can you prove that they were just saving paper and then it wasn't that the person doing it wasn't the same as botanist who was trying to show the comparison of these things so it depends on which camp you fall in I personally err on the side of leaving it together but we've gone back and forth so those are the reasons you might want to split it up because you feel like it's just too confusing and we can't manage it but you will lose that piece of history unless you document exactly what was on the sheet with it and apropos of that Bo Harris said I would argue that it would not only put the specimen at risk of damage but it could erase important and interesting history and D. Stubbs-Lee said it's similar conundrum-ness to whether or not to remove archival materials from an original scrapbook oh yeah scrapbooks are a whole other wall of wax and we have all these also we have all these bound exocotysets which I didn't have time to talk about as soon as you pull things apart you lose history and for some scrapbooks you really have to do something because they're so brittle and then you do your best to use like library style archival practices to then keep it together as best you can but we keep all these bound exocotysets which are a little bit different we keep them together and most institutions think we're a little bit eccentric for doing this until they then try to put the data for that back together and realize that you don't always have all the provenance information when you split it all apart and you can't put it back together and you know if you have people that really only care about taxonomy and not history more broadly they might argue that's the thing that makes it easier to work with taxonomically which is true but I always want to think about that we don't know what people really want to use our collection for so as much as we want to preserve the natural history that if we just throw the history away we could be throwing away a whole line of research in five or five hundred years yeah Pam Pupo says what's the percentage of ethanol used for flowers and other pickled materials that varies and seventy percent is a pretty standard mixture for a lot of things well not a lot we've had researchers do things in 90% in certain groups of fungi and in insects for example if you have things in 90% or 99% then you can do molecular extractions from the material that doesn't work as well if you've had them in 70% so it varies a lot and if you're going to start doing new material in ethanol I would search for some literature based on what the best practices are for your specific subfield and when it comes to knowing what's in your jars good luck and I hope you have a chemist friend we've got stuff and we have no idea what's in the jar it could be formaldehyde, it could be FAA it could be rum, I don't know they'll be no Nicholas Henry said how or even are dangerous or irritant plants like poison ivy stored and you did cover this later yeah and poison ivy is not a big problem once those oils dry up it's not a big problem so for a little bit, it's tricky and our mounters wear gloves but there's a genus in the Fabaceae Macuna which is one of the examples that actually has toxins in the little trichomes the hairs on the seed pods and that can actually cause we had to cause a serious medical problem for somebody and we knew it was a dangerous area but it would actually reassess the collections and now everything is in bags and more aggressively marked so it's less likely someone will get hurt Megan Dory says joining from Northeastern Oklahoma I'm really interested in the possibility of starting at Ennevarium as a tribal organization do you have any ideas about that oh that's fabulous I would say that I would say grabbing the herbarium handbook or borrowing it from somewhere to get an idea for anyone that wants to start any collection and some of the data that is recorded on some materials is local and historic uses and cultural uses or cultural meanings and native and vernacular names for things and I would say that the focus is a tribal collection and that would be really important and not just coordinating with because if you ask any herbarium we'll all help you we'd love to help each other but also that the ethnobotanical community would probably be a really great resource to reach out to and if you send me an email I can put you in contact with some people right and in fact I will I'm going to add a few things to the handout and also add Genevieve's email address which I didn't before and I usually do okay so for sheets this is just a comment Diana co-teropolis says for sheets of multiple species we add two accession numbers the one for each and Adriana Lopez says what kind of ink should I use to print labels for sheets or packages do people use special software or an app to make their labels oh Adriana that is such a loaded question so I would say that do not use inkjet ink no matter what you do we have found that the two best for paper labels not going for liquid collections that the two best things are typewriter ribbon and laser jets laser jet ink is pretty stable we print on bond paper 25% cotton rag and we've actually tested it under water we run it under water we test our specific laser printer and it's been pretty good so I would say if you can afford a laser printer that's probably your best bet people used to use the matrix printers back and forth with the perforations on the edge and that ink also worked so if you've got really old stuff that's great for making labels it's super variable some people will put all their collections data into a spreadsheet and they have a template that they do a mail merge for some people have software that helps generate labels Bestify I believe had which is an open source natural history collections content management system had a label making program some collectors have just typed everything into a Word document so that's like the least effective way in some ways because then you can't do anything with your information later so I would say that if you don't have a lot of resources and you want something fairly easy just putting everything into a spreadsheet and doing mail merges is great and if you do everything according to Darwin core which I didn't mention here but it's the symbiotic portal those resources about Darwin core but if you do it according to those types of fields then you also can share that data very easily Mary French says if we have an herbarium with known arsenic contamination it was painted onto some of the ferns what steps should we take to keep our conservators safe as well as preserve the safety of others accessing these materials Mary you know I've never actually had anything with arsenic we've had stuff with mercure chloride methyl bromide vapona but we haven't had arsenic in our collection but what I would do and anyone with arsenic stuff I would look in the conservation literature and maybe go through spinach and see if there's someone there that knows because that is something that mammal skins have a lot of and also textiles have a lot of so I would say talking to someone in textiles or mammals about what they do but I would say that if you've got arsenic stuff that should definitely be separated because usually it is separated and I think put in paper and handled differently but I have no expertise and because it is dangerous I don't want to say that give recommendations but I would say talking to someone in memology or in textiles are your best bet and I'll add to the handout we did a really good webinar on hazardous materials I'll add that to the handout fabulous and then Pam Pupo says again can you provide some links with information for funding opportunities for small regional areas you know funding is this is going to sound really really ridiculous but funding is so far outside of my realm of expertise I'm exceptionally fortunate that I work at a very large institution and that pretty much all funding is above my pay grade I would say that there are regional portals and regional networks to do things and that the INLS institute for museum and library studies I believe services has a lot of grant and they do do smaller things but I'm just really not familiar I can ask around but I can't quickly pull together links for the handout I'm so sorry but there are resources and if you're in a small herbarium I would reach out to maybe some of the larger herbaria in your region so you're in the North Dakota counties like that kind of Midwest but also the Rockies region is the inner mountain herbaria portal but sometimes larger institutions will chair a national science foundation AD, BC, TC, and grant it's a lot of letters but advancing digital biodiversity collections the matta collection network grants where then small herbaria can piggyback on those and get a lot of resources for how their collections get help you might check with NSF they may have some small the national science foundation they may have some small grants for natural history collections and Carol Buck says will the PowerPoint slides be added to the handouts yes they will so as soon as the slide announcing this webinar is no longer on our main page you can you'll note to look in the archives and there will be the recording, the slides, the handouts and I will also add to the handout that is below I may even start a second handout because it's very long and full of interesting stuff you should take a look at all the ideas that Genevieve tagged and Carol says there's also the CAP program conservation assessments for preservation program which might work for some of the smaller institutions and if you have natural history collections there are natural history people that will look at them so that's another good suggestion and I think that's it so please pay attention to the website and other outreach that we do and we'll hope to see you in the summer for either HVAC or FIRE or for the course on assessment.