Abstract:
This year’s conference theme is “Making the Case for Natural History Collections”. As more effort and resources are spent on digitizing collections and making them available to an ever expanding audience we feel it becomes more and more important to explain what museum collections are, how we preserve them, and most importantly why we have these collections and why they matter. New to this meeting is a session called Specimen Spotlight. This is a chance for everyone to highlight one specimen in their collection and explain why that specimen is special and what makes it important. My hope is that these short, five-minute, one-slide presentations will allow everyone to participate at the meeting and when viewed as a group these spotlights will demonstrate the diversity, importance, and greatness of museum collections that we, as collection workers, already understand.