Catalog: Oregon State Arthropod Collection   

Introduction to Catalog: Oregon State Arthropod Collection

2017 Vol 1 (1) i.

The purpose behind Catalog: Oregon State Arthropod Collection is to provide a means 
by which the Oregon State Arthropod Collection (OSAC) can record, disseminate and 
archive records, documents, datasets and information related to the collection, which are 
not often formally published/archived elsewhere.  Because of this, these resources can be 
hard to access and easily lost over time.

Anyone who has worked closely with natural history collections is aware that in addi-
tion to the specimens themselves, these institutions generate and maintain a host of other 
records, documents and information related to the specimens and the research activities 
associated with them.  In some cases, these records hold useful biological information 
related to specimen label data; in other cases they provide historical context about how 
specimens arrived (or left) the collection.  These types of records are seldom published in 
any real sense and exist often as single copy files in file cabinets or sometime recorded in 
abbreviated formats in hand-written catalogs or as database entries.

The development of archived digital-only journals provides a flexible low cost option for 
storing these types of documents.   Use of a journal format allows end users, data pro-
ducers and archivists a long established mechanism for consolidating these records while 
making them vastly more available to the research community.  In addition to increasing 
availability, a museum focused journal takes advantage of several established academic 
traditions: (1) journals provide a stable long-term and indexed structure for recording the 
information, (2) journals (electronic and printed) are known quantities for librarians and 
archivists, and thus the museum community need not re-invent standards for sharing 
and archiving this information and (3) it allows researchers making use of the informa-
tion in scholarly works, an easy method of citing the information source.    It is hoped 
that by making these records ‘citable’ in the standard sense, the important role that 
museums/natural history collections play in providing foundational data for research 
papers may become more visible via their inclusion in bibliographies of those papers.

       

        Christopher J. Marshall