Orphaned/ unstudied collections list

From
Date
Hi everybody:

At the Invertebrate Paleo workshop at NAPC last June,  orphaned and
unstudied collections were identified as a major and increasing problem in
the paleontological community.  Universities, oil companies, government
agencies, and individuals are divesting themselves of their collections at
a greater rate than ever before.  Many institutions also house significant
unstudied material that is unknown to researchers in general.

I proposed that we establish an electronic bulletin board to inform
museums, universities and researchers of the availability of orphaned
collections for adoption and unstudied collections for study by others.
The idea was a simple information exchange so that collections might be
better dealt with when orphaned and special collections might be better
studied.  A simple electronic bulletin board, after thinking about it,
seemed less suitable than an interactive World Wide Web site.

Dr. Meredith Lane and NSF-DEB approved a small grant to build such a Web
site.  We now have a test version of the so-called ICAL (Interactive
Collections Availability List) on-line for your visits and suggestions.  We
invite the general paleontological community to take a look at ICAL and to
provide suggestions and comments for improvement.

The WWW location is:  http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/ICAL/

This is the homepage for ICAL.  It provides a brief introduction.  There
are links to 4 other pages:  1.  List of Available Collections.  2.  Add
your collection to the List.  3.  Add your name or institution to the
distribution list.  4.  Why is ICAL a good idea.   Please test this
interactive site to make sure that it will meet your needs.

Do this by reading link 4, then  enter some made-up or real data on a
collection that is either an orphan or just available for study in Link 2.
Let us know what you think of the choices and whether or not we  missed
any.  Then go to Link 1 to see how your and other people's entries appear.
Is this okay?

Please enter anything you wish, because all information entered until the
November 15, 1996, will be deleted before ICAL is officially started.

The final version of ICAL will include an automatic notification feature.
All posts of collections will automatically be emailed to anyone who
subscribes to this feature.  I would presume that museums, some
universities and colleges, and some researchers may wish to subscribe.  The
list will be available to anyone accessing the Web site, even if they are
not subscribed.  We presume that we will not have "electronic vandalism"
(spurious entries, bs requests, etc.).  If that develops, we'll put some
kind of block in place to exclude the buggers.

If you have suggestions, please email them to me.  Thanks very much.

Jere

Jere H. Lipps, Professor and Director
Department of Integrative Biology and
Museum of Paleontology
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720 USA

Voice:  510-642-9006.  Fax:  510-642-1822.
Internet:  jlipps@ucmp1.berkeley.edu
WWW:  http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/jlipps/jlipps.html