The Conservator

(e.g. Ceruti, 1622; Imperato, 1599; Legati, 1677; Ruysch et al., 1710; Worm, 1655).

Honourable mentions to Charles Waterton who also gets a mention in the text but whose text was from the early 1800s.

Waterton, C. (1825). Wanderings in South America, the North-west of the United States, and the Antilles, in the years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824. With Original Instructions for the perfect preservation of Birds, etc. For Cabinets of Natural History.

It's fun to get to play with historic sources when every other field of study puts a ton of weight on recent research. Well uhh you see the thing is that 'recent research' in this field doesn't exist so I need to use the primary sources... from uuuh... the birth of science...

Sources:

Ceruti, B. (1622). Musaeum Franc. Calceolari iun. Veronensis. https://archive.org/details/MusaeumFranc.CalceolariIun.Veronensis/page/n731/mode/thumb

Imperato, F. (1599). Dell’historia natvrale di Ferrante Imperato napoletano libri XXVIII: nella qvale ordinatamente si tratta della diuersa condition di miniere e pietre: Con alcune historie di piante & animali, sin’hora non date in luce.

Legati, L. (1677). Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua patria dall’illustrissimo signor Ferdinando Cospi patrizio di Bologna e senatore cavaliere commendatore di S. Stefano, Balì d’Arezzo, e march. Di Petriolo, fra’ gli Accademici Gelati il fedele, e principe al presente de’ medisimi. https://archive.org/details/museocospianoann00lega/page/n29/mode/2up

Ruysch, F., Bidloo, L., Coster, L., & Hüyberts, C. (with Smithsonian Libraries). (1710). Frederici Ruischii anatom. & botanices professoris ... Thesaurus animalium primus: Cum figuris aeneis = Het eerste cabinet der dieren. Amstelaedami : Apud Joannem Wolters. http://archive.org/details/fredericiruischi00ruys

This week was slow going. I've mostly been e-mailing people: I still need to find whoever knows anything about the collection journal, or find out if they exist at all. I've yet to put up my climate monitors, a task which is ostensibly late for me to do (though not disastrously so), and I've still my task of 'establish rapport with my supervisor'. However, I did get my thoughts together to book a meeting with him, and I've managed to book several other meetings afterward, which is great news! So, hopefully I'll be able to work more consistently now that I've kickstarted that collaboration.

Next week will surely be more e-mails, but I have gotten some good texts to read. And I've a sort of "homework" for the next couple supervisor meetings, which will hopefully encourage me to keep my momentum.

For now I'm hoping to hear from the meteorite expert, whom last had anything to do with the collection in 2015. I hope he hasn't forgotten where or who is responsible for those loaned specimens in the past decade...

So far I have only briefly looked through the collection storage facilities, and that may be a very generous description. Water damage(s), tempterature fluctuations, pests, no shelves, containers precariously positioned on pallets and the like... And so on. I'll be setting up climate monitors some time in the coming week, while I figure out which rooms require what kind of attention, as well as getting an idea of exactly how extensive potential damages are - there's a lot of shelves in this collection, and any of of them may or may not be full of damaged specimens that I have not yet been able to see.

The university wants to eventually move the collection into one location at the moment, but the room they want to move the collection into is one of aforementioned water-damaged rooms. I'll have to see if I can present a convincing argument in the form of "Please Do Not" by the end of this process, which hopefully shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I've got a couple things to do in the coming weeks, mostly consisting of 'setting up climate monitors' and 'emails'. I need to figure out who may have access to the old collection journals. My biggest mystery yet...

Image of a cestode specimen slide mounted on blue glass, no coverslip, from Schmid, T., Hidde, J., Grünier, S., Jungnickel, R., Dariz, P., Riedel, J., & Neuhaus, B. (2021). Ageing Effects in Mounting Media of Microscope Slide Samples from Natural History Collections: A Case Study with Canada Balsam and PermountTM. Polymers, 13(13), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13132112