Read the full story at Popular Science.
Natural history museums offer amazing portals into worlds miles away from our own, and into eras from the distant past. Comprised of fossils, minerals, preserved specimens, and much more, some collections are of palatial grandeur. Although every museum has some sort of system in place to track incoming and outgoing items, those systems are not connected, museum to museum. Keeping a more detailed record of who has what across the world could not only be important for conservation, but for cataloging how life on Earth has changed, and forecasting how it will continue to do so in the future.
For example, there are case studies showing how analyzing the collections of these museums can be useful for studying pandemic preparedness, invasive species, colonial heritage, and more.
But this lack of connection might be a thing of the past. A paper published in the journal Science last week describes how a dozen large museums came together to map the entire collections of 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums across 28 countries in order to figure out what digital infrastructure is needed to establish a global inventory survey.
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