The "colonial explorer" image was about exploration and conquering exotic lands. Specimens of everything that was encountered were collected and often later donated or sold to museums. This approach became unpopular because it encouraged overcollecting of natural areas to make money selling specimens to museums. The reason for collections and collecting needed re-inventing, and a resource/conservation/heritage approach was adopted. There are problems with the heritage approach as it is primarily static when collections need to grow. The modern trend in museums is to collect only voucher specimens or specimens that fill taxonomic gaps in collections (Oberholzer 1988). This is to protect local biodiversity and is also often because of space and human capacity constraints in museums caused by lack of sufficient funding for taxonomic research; the latter is evident over the last decades on the national (Herbert 2001; Smith et al. 2008), as well as on the global scale (e.g., Boero 2010; Pyke & Ehrlich 2010). There has also been a tendency for South African museums to specialise in certain groups, rather than to curate specimens from all orders. Although this makes sense in the light of space and capacity limits, it creates the real possibility that certain areas of the country will be undersampled because a museum that collects a particular order lies in another part of the country. There are thus reasons to revisit this approach to museum collections.

To cite this paper: Williams, K.A. 2010. Museum collections - resources for biological monitoring. African Invertebrates 51 (1): 219-221.