Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020 - 17

Society Reports
help us in aligning resources and investments in biodiversity
informatics to improve knowledge of the world's species and
understanding of the dynamics of natural systems in support
of a sustainable future for science and society."
Finally, please let me know if you have ideas for future collaborations between SPNHC and GBIF.
Respectfully submitted,
James Macklin, SPNHC representative to GBIF

Heritage Emergency National Task Force
The Heritage Emergency National Task
Force (HENTF) is a cooperative venture
between the Smithsonian Institution
Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI) and
the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), under:
Lori Foley
Administrator, Heritage Emergency
National Task Force
Office of Environmental Planning & Historic Preservation
Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration
FEMA | DHS
The mission of HENTF is to protect cultural heritage in our
nation's states, tribes, territories, and local communities from
the damaging effects of natural disasters and other emergencies. This is a summary of the annual members meeting,
"Strengthening the Role of HENTF Members," in Washington, D.C., held June 13, 2019.
HENTF Members were self-assigned into three working
groups:
*

Communications Working Group: to create and maintain
tools that will help HENTF members to obtain situational
awareness during emergencies; share resources with constituents and gather damage assessments; and empower
constituents to effectively communicate with the public
about cultural heritage and disasters.

Asset Mapping Working Group: to develop, coordinate,
and strengthen effective outreach networks to support
cultural institutions from the threats of disasters by maximizing the implementation of existing datasets of domestic culture institutions and encourage the development of
new datasets where none exists.

Resource Development Working Group: to examine
existing resources and identify challenges in disseminating disaster preparedness, response, recovery, and

mitigation resources before, during, and after emergency
situations.
Filling in for Cathy Hawks, SPNHC representative, Lisa
Palmer participated on the Asset Mapping Working Group.
Issues of privacy and protecting culturally sensitive collections and collecting/archaeological areas were of concern.
The group considered whether this data should be included in
mapping. This working group, led by Andrew Robb from the
Library Congress, will focus on gathering publicly available
data from existing datasets.
Additionally, HENTF held a national phone conference in
January 2020 to disseminate information and resources to
constituents in Puerto Rico who have been affected by the
multitude of earthquakes occurring there. HENTF was able
to organize emergency response initiatives by using newly
developed online dashboards to collect and disseminate information for impacted constituents.
Respectfully submitted,
Lisa Palmer on behalf of Catharine Hawks,
SPNHC representative to HENTF

Integrated Digitized Biocollections
How (ridiculously) fast time goes by,
and how much changes in ten years.
NSF's Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) digitization
program. currently in year nine, will
fund Thematic Collections Networks
(TCNs) in year ten. The TCNs collectively contribute the majority of our
121 million records. That's many of you
doing the hard, important work of mobilizing specimen data.
Thanks to all of you from iDigBio, for fantastic collaborations in symposia, workshops, workflows development,
webinars, working groups (that is a lot of w's), short courses,
conferences, and publications. iDigBio is currently hard at
work summarizing the human efforts, discoveries, and materials resulting from the ADBC collections digitization work
to date.

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2020