librarypunk - 134 - Museum Ethics feat. Brigit

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

This week we’re talking about museums, ethics, and taxonomy. Probably other stuff too! Media mentioned https://www.geocurator.org/images/resources/geocurator/vol7/geocurator_7_6.pdf#page=14 "FRONTIERS TO SCIENCE: FREE TRADE AND MUSEUM ETHICS"  by Tristram P. Besterman, 2001 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69005527 "US curator denies smuggling scorpions and spiders from Istanbul" BBC News, 2024 https://webarchive.unesco.org/web/20230926050719/https://en.unesco.org/cultnatlaws/list The web archived version of the UNESCO database for national cultural heritage laws, which ....they've taken down from their website for some reason? I was literally working from this list last year so idk what happened https://www.audubon.org/news/the-history-and-evolution-migratory-bird-treaty-act The Audubon website's heavily summarised history of the MBTA; pay particular note to the blurbs under 1900 and 1916 https://www.ducks.org/ The Ducks Unlimited website. Note Conservation and Hunting as top two tabs. https://www.ducks.ca/about/our-partners/ The Ducks Unlimited Canada website page of corporate partners! Count the number of oil pipelines! https://pridesource.com/article/stomping-spots-queer-feelings-for-a-bad-bug-heading-to-michigan Episode transcript in HTML (download to view): https://pastecode.io/s/e7ye92tz  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG

I don't have anything to warm up with. I read that modern museum article that we were going to go over a while ago. It's kind of stuff we've already talked about. Yeah. It's just the same guy who is saying he wants to get his heart back. And they're like, actually, your donation's one of the solid ones we have in terms of like consent. So we want to keep it. And that's kind of it.

My thing with it was just that it's like two people who are like, we want our specimens back because the curator changed. And then it's like talking about how they want their specimens back. And then at the very end, it's like, by the way, they gave them back. Yeah. Like one of them. Yeah. Yeah. One of them, it's like we gave her.

We gave hers back. And then we're working with him to keep his in our collection and doing the purpose that he wanted it to do. But the whole article was just like, these are the problems at the mutter museum. By the way, they just gave them back to them. That's fine. Yeah. Have you been hearing all this Bridget about the mutter museum? Yes, I'm sure.

Yeah. Everyone has bad opinions about it. Everyone usually has a lot of opinions about museums. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when I heard you were coming on, I was like, huh? maybe we can get an opinion on the mutter museum

to balkle from like an actual museum person then I was just like, you know what, don't make it about that. It's already been enough. Also, I feel like, I don't know, I usually try and say, like, especially when reading articles and like the actual, like,

literature about museum collections and stuff, I always say that like, oh, all of these concepts are, like really broadly applicable to a lot like a variety of museum collections but but sometimes when you come down to like actual practicing stuff like natural history functions that just like a weird like other areas than like art and artifacts do and so yeah I don't know and people have a lot of feelings if people have a lot of feelings about one they usually have like completely different feelings about the other. So like, I don't know. And as I said, the first time we talked about it,

everyone with opinions about the Motor Museum is a bunch of like Gen X gotts who are like, no, we want our spooky museum. It's like, I also want the spooky museum. But maybe let's not have, like maybe let's let them do their audit, maybe. You know, see how many like unconsenting dead people are in here. Yeah. Maybe let's check that first. Curators and collection managers are just always begging for an audit. Can we please do our inventory?

Can we please, please give us time and money to figure out what's in our collections. Sounds like libraries. We need to do a freezer audit at my work because there was a, a freezer audit. So there's, we have a big, like, walk-in freezer that's filled with specimens, and in this case means dead animals. And we had a bit of an emergency one weekend that I may have told Jay about that meant that we, like, would maybe lose some of these specimens due to thawing accidentally. And that didn't happen, but it did sort of give us the kick in the ass that was like, okay, we need to actually figure out whether we need to, what, are we actually going to do

anything with this entire giant deer that's sitting in the freezer? Or should we find a way to get rid of it, maybe? Yeah. The deer that we had to move so that the repairman could set up his step ladder inside the freezer. Like, yeah. Just moving a deer. Yeah, it took two of us

And we sort of like It was sort of frozen in like this position So we like tipped it up onto its butt And tried to like slide it Like a couch To one side Yeah, like you walk it out like a couch We realized later where all of the like

Heavy moving equipment was Like all of the straps and moving blankets And that sort of thing was So we were like oh okay Next time we have to move a deer Now we know where all of that is always a next time isn't there yeah yeah exactly yeah surprising a lot of deer preservation stuff in the notes which I was like aren't those

deer like overpopulated but I guess we'll get into it get into it they're basically rats where I come from oh there's your problem episode about deer Yeah. And they're just like, they're vermin. Yeah, no. I mean, as a vegetarian, the area where I'm from, like, hunting is part of conservation there

because there's an overpopulation of them. And so it's like you kind of get the first day of deer hunting season off school because your teachers are also deer hunting. I don't, I never deer hunted, though. I'm a, I'm a sissy. I'm like, oh, no. Is this Indiana? Illinois.

Illinois, sorry, yeah. Yeah, Southern Illinois. Yep. No, that's sort of the same where I'm from too, which is the west coast of Canada. But it's usually looked at as in, or I guess maybe it isn't usually looked at. Maybe the general populace does think that they're cute and fluffy

and should stick around. But I always look at it as a problem of like, well, it's because we're either killing or like escorting away all of the things that will manage the deer, which are the cougar. So, yeah, yeah. And who doesn't love a hot, older woman, you know? In your area?

I think we should have more around. Okay, hopefully this works. I'm Justin, I'm a Skalkham librarian. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay.

I'm a music librarian, and my pronouns are he him. We have a guest, Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Dr. Bridgett-Tronridge. I'm a natural history collections manager. I have experience working in natural history museums in Canada and the UK and Norway, and I'm particularly well-versed in birds in paleontology.

Welcome. Thank you. So you've already introduced yourself a little bit, but tell us about where you're at now and what your work looks like. Yeah, so I work at a museum in Canada right now. Again, I'm the collections management specialist, actually, which is a weird title, and not very specialized because I'm helping with the collections of all the natural history

fields, so that includes zoology and botany as well as geology and paleontology, and they all have their own separate curators and everything. So I work a lot with the like the care and storage of natural history specimens. I also help with database things and all the digital aspects of the specimens. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Are you like part of wrangling the curators and making sure that they're like sorting things properly and not running off in their own direction? or? Yeah, a little bit.

Some of it is like making sure that they cool it a little on the actual like field collections. I also help with the sort of pre-acquisition and object entry as well as loans of objects. And all of that paperwork is something that I have to do that they sometimes don't think about. Yeah. No, I just hired a number. another librarian to help with research data management. And I was talking to someone in our research division trying to explain like what his job is and what services were expanding. And I was trying to explain situations where we don't get the paperwork right. And so, you know, if there's no consent,

particularly with like human subjects, it's we can't make it open because the IRB never made any kind of an anonymization plan or anything like that. It's like, well, we can put it into special collections, but it's going to remain sealed for 70 to 100 years. So, yeah. So we try to make sure that that problem doesn't happen. And also it gives us licensing and stuff because we just got a request from like a course course pack company to license some stuff that's available for free.

But because we own the copyright, it's like, we should probably. have a fee structure for commercial requests. And so that's now gotten bumped up to legal for the system. So. Yeah, that makes sense. Could happen in the future. Yeah. In natural history collections,

there's usually a lot of researchers coming in and making sure that they have all the data release agreements or collections access agreements and those things signed. it's not only important for that sort of like if they're taking images of the specimen who do those images belong to and that sort of thing but also it's good for reporting and like knowing which specimens are being accessed more than others is a really good statistic to have yeah when you have like do you have like a circulation system like like eon or is it a different circulation system or specimens or do you not have one at all?

I'm going to guess that this is a special library thing, circulation, because we just have databases, which are essentially like catalogs with various records of things. And we just keep track of where things are in their location, but I don't think I would call that circulation. I think that's a special library thing. But yeah, I don't know. Sometimes we're dealing with a database that I think was handcrafted in 1994 and hasn't been updated since. Sounds right.

Oh, boy. Made with so much love in the past. Is it like a SQL database or something? Which? A SQL? I don't know. It's called Star. And I don't think there's like any...

I think it's so old that like the people in charge of it have like basically downgraded their like any sort of help to like one person who's like, I guess I'll deal with the museums that are still using this, which is just us. But we are upgrading it to a new fancy database, which is like online hosted and everything. just not something that I'm used to, but it seems better. Yeah, library software has gone the same route.

Instead of it being hosted on like a server at your institution, it's like hosted, it's like a cloud service, a SaaS, a software as a service thing that like you buy from a vendor to host it for you or something like that. That's interesting to know. There's also like trade-offs if you're at a museum that has both natural history and human history, like the one that I work at, then often you'll get this sort of rift between the natural history and human history people because there are databases that work much better for either one of those, but not necessarily both. And so there's a lot of consolations that have to be made. So I think we maybe ended up with one that was sort of human. and history-oriented. I'm just throwing your rocks and deer and stuff. I'm just trying to think of if you are trying to merge, it sounds like if you're trying to merge an academic library with a public library, which have very different purposes and needs.

So I'm like trying to think of a database that would cover both of those, which there are like inter-integrated library systems, ILSs that do both. But yeah, a lot of the times they're way more skewed towards one than towards the other. Yeah, like when my library is on code. Ohah can be used for academic libraries, and they do. But it's also very public and school-focused, which is frustrating. I hate it. Yeah.

Usually you just get fields like artist or maker or something that you're like, well, this is a bird. Jesus Christ made this bird, the Lord. Mother Earth. What do you put there? Yeah, exactly. The Demi Urge made it. When people are accessing the collections, is there, like, if they're going to see a specimen, I, from what I remember of certain, like, natural history museums, is there, like, a sample viewing room that people use? And is that when you collect the data on which samples are used because you bring it to the researcher, or the researchers, like, go into the deer freezer and just start poking it.

And then you just, like, you just, like, stand up. aside with a clipboard. I think it can vary in case to case and from museum to museum. Sometimes they're like, they have the privilege of space in that they can have a separate room where there's like, yeah, this is where all the visiting researchers can just sit down and we bring the specimens to them and then when they're done, they leave them on that cart and then we put them back and that sort of thing. and I think that would be the case where like I think it's it should probably always be the case that the collections manager, the curator, has an idea of what to pull already before the researcher comes.

So like that sort of list gets put onto the paperwork. But sometimes there will be or even sometimes the researcher is able to look at the available specimens at it. museum and know like, oh, I know you're holding like this one and this one and this one of this specific dinosaur that I'm researching and like they're able to, you know, give you your own catalog numbers of things. But sometimes it'll be a little more casual. I was working with a researcher who was like looking at very specific dinosaur things and but he was visiting over a number of weeks because he was like doing, what was he doing? What was he doing? He was taking, he was 3D modeling them somehow in like taking a whole bunch of photos of like each individual specimen and there were like over 20 specimens that he was looking at.

And it would sort of be the case where as I was finding specimens, I could bring them out to him and like show them to him. It was also a case of I had like just started my job and there wasn't really anyone else who knew where all of the stuff was. So it was almost like me learning the collections as I was finding stuff for this guy. So it was a little bit of a special case. But yeah, ideally no one who doesn't work at the museum is like poking through drawers. We tend to not like that for security reasons. Is there a library in your museum, like, for y'all and researchers? Yeah, there is a library.

Yeah, how closely do you work with them? Well, the library is, actually, I know this, the library is not circulating. Or maybe it is. Oh, no. I thought I could bring this to the librarians. The thing is that it's all catalysts. And it's on a system where you can check out a book, but the book doesn't actually leave the building.

And the only people who can check out the book are the staff who work at the museum. If that makes sense. Yeah. And also the person in charge of the museum is my counterpart in human history. So she has like a whole other job that isn't being a librarian. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are barely holding it together.

Like, great. Good to hear. That's what Aon was when we had stuff that didn't leave, it still circulated because it went to the reading room. And so when I was working in special collections, people would have to, it wasn't connected to the rest of the library systems. It was its own system. And that would include things that weren't books. But it was also like manuscript collections, boxes, stuff like that. So I was wondering if you use something like that for specimens and you could just, a reason,

would create an account and then you'd check stuff out to them, you'd know what gets used. Yeah. No, usually that doesn't happen. But it is an interesting idea. Yeah, special collections are like the museums of libraries. Okay. Yeah. Especially because museums are not so crazy about having their specimens leave the building.

In addition to the paperwork that has to happen when that does happen. it's also just like, if a researcher can come to the place, then the specimen can just stay here and we can have it at the end of the day in our own little hands rather than like mailing it off somewhere. Or, you know, I've heard so many horror stories of the postal system. Deer thawing in mid. Yeah, or like. Christless muscle, like getting broken or something.

There was one that was like, A person at a Canadian museum getting a call from some sort of like US agent about why there's a fish in this box because she was sending the sample to Russia. And so I guess she was like, why do you have my fish? I'm sending it to this researcher in Russia. And they were like, well, everything that goes to Russia comes to us first. And she was like, damn, it's the 80s. stink. The cold war would get you. Exactly. Anyways, the research did get a nuclear code, but she was so mad about

that fish getting opened. I wouldn't want the TSA poking at my fossils either. And that's not a euphemism. Gender? What is this? Soviet Russia? Exactly.

It works. So often, that drop is really like, it's, it's like the, it's like the pliers or the duct tape of drops. It really works in so many, anytime gender or the Soviet Union comes up. Get a lot of mileage out of that one. Quite often on this show. You have a note about the need for internal documentation for front of house staff and making judgments about accepting collections at the front desk. So when you have people at staffing the front desk, people just walk up and try and hand you stuff, which we get that with books. But also seems a little different.

I mean, sometimes it comes about in like people have found this thing and they're just hoping that they can get it identified or like learn more about it. Usually, like, for that example, it was usually a lot of fossils that, like, people were digging up some sort of ammonite or whatever, or they had been digging through a rubble pile and found whatever. And then they were just sort of, and they were like, I think this is a bone. They would make a guess and it would be very funny usually. And then that would get, like, handed to the front desk person. And then that would get circulated to people who would be able to answer the question. but it's all with a very important piece of paperwork that really covers the museum's ass

in terms of ownership. Because that's, I think, one of the big things that people don't really think about in museums is, like, when does an object belong to the museum? And the trouble with just getting handed off, off something at the museum without anything being signed or without any like communication between anyone who works there and the person dropping it off is that is that this thing doesn't actually belong to the museum because there is no transfer of title and because the object

doesn't belong to the museum the museum has like no legal authority to dispose of it technically the most that they can try to do is to, like, try and get it back to the person who did bring it in, but sometimes that's impossible. So when it's a case of people, like, appropriately and responsibly coming in with a thing signing the little paperwork that says that I will come back for this, and if I don't come back for this, then the museum can get rid of it. So, like, having that sort of consent involved, even if there's no. intended transfer of title in the process. Is there like a process for like if something does get like, I'm thinking like financially, it's like you have to hold on for something for like seven years or like, you know, public libraries.

I don't know about academic libraries, but you deal with like a lot of like freedom of information requests and retention periods that you have to keep that kind of thing. Like after three years you can throw it out. After seven years you can write off the debt kind of thing. Is there anything like that for like untitled specimens or objects? Absolutely, yeah. I think it depends, again, on the institution and probably a bit on the country that you're working into. I haven't actually dug a lot into this legal side of things, but I'm sure there is like some sort of either something that the museum says on their own paperwork that you sign that's like if you don't come back for this within.

like 30 days or something, then we can get rid of it if, you know, or something that the actual like countries legislation has decided is appropriate for whatever the thing is. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a lot like, so I'm assuming with stuff this old, it's not like copyright law that you're going, but like a lot of people, I guess like don't assume that like in library collections a lot of the time, like copyright law dictates a lot of what we can and can't do with them, what we can and can't accept, what we then like can and can't do with stuff that we then have, like, all of this stuff. Like, this is a problem in special collections of digital collections a lot,

where it's like you might have something, but do you have the permission to digitize it? And even if you do, do you have the permission to display it publicly? But when you're dealing with specimens like this, like copyright law isn't necessarily the legal hurdle that you're dealing with. but like I guess that sort of oh we have this thing now but since we actually don't have the legal right to throw it away we're just like stuck with it like I feel like that's like a thing that maybe the public wouldn't think about because it's like oh it's just a rock or it's just a fossil or it's just this like whatever just throw it away but like all of these legal things and like ownership like looking at your notes and like the concept of process. property within a museum. It got me really thinking in a system where like public versus private property looked a lot different, maybe not in a capitalist system. How would that change how museums worked? For example, with like the concept of property and specimens being the property of something, right? Yeah, that's really interesting. Very thought-provoking. Like what's a communist museum look like? I mean, I guess there's,

are communist countries, but, you know, I don't know how they work. I think it's also interesting sometimes when that sort of legislation technically extends to the collection of the material, like even before it comes to a museum itself, that like, depending on where you find it or where you've excavated it or something, it could technically belong to the state or it could belong to the state or it could belong to such and such land bureau or, you know, or maybe it belongs to the person who owns that land if it's like a private individual.

I know there is something in the UK where it was like, where it was like some sort of coastline and a certain distance above the water level, it was technically crown property or something, but like a certain distance below it was, something else. So, like, you could be fossil hunting and, like, you know, needing to make sure exactly where you were to make sure that you were, I don't know, collecting from the crown and not from somewhere else from the ocean itself. Yeah. The UK is a very silly country. Yeah. And, yeah, I think I was listening to some, like, I think a conference from last year,

I was listening to some talks about it and there was a person describing their like paleontology field excursions and like being in an area where there could be the, you could either be on like Bureau of Land Management land or like some other like national

something or other or like some sort of state something or other or like and like you needed to be like really careful about where exactly you were collecting and that sometimes it wasn't sometimes there was like no indicator on this like huge dusty outcrop of like whose land it actually is now or like even if there is a fence then sometimes the fence is in the wrong place and like it wasn't actually yeah and but I think in that case it had restrictions more on whether or not you You collected from there and then tried to sell it after.

There were more restrictions on like the commercialization of the things that you found rather than the actual like physical act of collecting it itself. If that makes sense. Yeah. You said that like the different land areas and I like a like a I got a very visceral like I used to live in an area that had like a national park. But then it also had state land that was like you could you could harvest timber on the state land. But it was right up against the national park. But it was also right up against national forest, which was under a different government like thing. So yeah, it's like I'm on.

I'm in the distance. I'm in these mountains, but I don't know whose land I'm standing on because, yeah, it's like six different agencies all own different parts of the same natural feature. jerk kind of thing, yeah. It's like that silly meme of like there being a place technically in Yellowstone where you could like get away with murder because of the various like jurisdictions, like not lining up properly or something. Like the one corner of Wyoming where like it's just what what's the name of that movie? It's a horror movie where you could just like kill people for 24 hours or something.

Oh, the purge. The purge. It's just that one corner of Wyoming is just the purge. Go listen to the horror vanguard episode about the purge. It's good. One of the, I think it was the one of the readings you gave us, the dust up in the bone pile, they mentioned something about federal fossils. Fossils dug on federal land couldn't be used for commercialization, but I don't remember.

Was that something that ended up passing or did, because that article was a little older? Oh, yeah. I'm not sure about that either. because I don't work in the U.S. anymore. I went to school there and learned and have done digging there. But, yeah, I'm not sure about that. Yeah, I don't have it open still. But there was also like the example of like when a government owns anything that might be found.

So I think it was like Alberta, where all fossils are owned by the state by default. Yeah. And I think there's a bunch of other countries too. I tried to Sorry about that link to the UNESCO thing. I don't know what happened to it. Government websites love to shift around. Oh yeah.

That's their job. I'm glad there is an archived version of it. But I was like, I was literally working off of this last year. What happened? But yeah, there was a bunch of countries where it like, where the wording of the legislation happened to be. like if you take something from the ground or if you like extract an object from the earth, then like it technically counts as cultural property which belongs to the state or, you know,

belongs to the nation. And I thought that was an interesting way, especially because looking at it purely from a paleontological standpoint, not a lot of legislation is like, especially outside of the U.S., where it's often not. as popular. A lot of the legislation doesn't actually like specifically say things like fossils or like paleontological material. It'll just be like artifacts or again like cultural property. And you're like, but does this old bone count as something cultural? Would you call it an artifact? Would you? Yeah. So the ones that do get specific enough to say something that is extracted from the ground. There's almost like a relief that you're like, oh, okay, so that is fossils too.

Now I'm thinking like if you dug up a Barbie that was buried in like 1957, does that count? Yeah, that's not yours anymore. Yeah. It belongs to the state. Yeah. Yeah. I click this link and there's one for Palestine, but it's only in Arabic. So if anyone knows what, I don't know if it would be Levantine or MSA, modern standard Arabic, and someone wants to translate that for the pod. I would love to read it. Yeah. Yeah, I also, I think I had to read something not that long ago. I was asked to co-author a paper with one of our biology faculty, who's a paleo-orthologist, or actually archaeoanthologists. So that was one of the words that we had to disambiguate the terms,

because it's the same thing in the way people were using the literature. So the paper was about terms in archaeoeranithology of used by the birdworking group who publish all of these papers together. And so we had a paper about keyword use and suggestions for control vocabulary so that everyone who publishes within that birdworking group can find each other's research because some of the terms weren't standardized. And I just, I had like, I was looking through like Gettys taxonomies and all these different ones that are still kind of being developed. And I, yeah, the, the different taxonomies that have to come together that haven't been talking to each other for a long time is very interesting because now they're starting to try and crosswalk those terms. So it's like, what is an artifact? And it's like, artifact, a thing that is made by a human, artifact, a thing that is like, you know, like a cultural understanding of the same word. And so that was when I decided like these things weren't mature enough to be applied to the whole field.

So they needed to like make for this working group their own little taxonomy for the time being because like the other taxonomies out there that are being worked on just aren't ready for. actual application in like a standardized way yet they're still very specific to specific fields like is this human is this natural history things like that use the homoessorice on the birds yeah that's really cool yeah this bird is gay it's just like a finger pointing at the bird that reminds me of part of my PhD I did my PhD on both extant and fossil birds. And part of it was looking at how birds use their feet and what sort of shapes their feet were in response to how they use them.

And one of the characteristics that I had was raptorial behavior. but in as because the word raptorial is so colloquial at this point it really like needed more of a strict definition especially for like how I was trying to research it and I ended up doing like more of a literature review than I ever expected to do just to see how people were using the word raptorial or bird of prey or like anything in that sort of of family of terms. And then whether or not they were just using that term and assuming that people knew what they were talking about or whether they were using that term and also using their own definition of it. So I ended up going with raptorial as birds that kill and carry prey with their feet. But I had to come to this conclusion from looking at what other people had been saying about

what this term meant and then also how I was specifically going to be researching this term, which was very like foot use oriented. And so that was the one that worked best for me, but it did leave out like technically vultures, even though sometimes people think of them as raptors or birds of prey that like, just because they don't actually kill and carry prey with their feet, they were left out of it. So, yeah. Going back to, the discussion about like property and sort of national paperwork. You gave us a link to, and then I guess what's an initial story about a U.S. curator who's pulling scorpions and spiders, but did you have more information about that? Because it was a very brief news story. And I think

maybe you had something about how the news gets transmitted. Maybe it might have been your point. Yeah, a little bit. I think, yeah, the article I sent you was just sort of BBC news. So that's like very like general populace flavor. And people who don't know a lot about how museums and how scientific research functions on the like sort of international scale can just read that and sort of take it at face value. But considering all of the, like, sort of international scale, can just read that and sort of take it at face value. But considering all of the, stories that I've heard about like how much paperwork you have to go through to be able to even just like research specific specimen in a different country can sometimes be like absolutely insane and so to the to the wait sorry I'm losing my train of thought because I don't function well at night. But the article didn't really come to any conclusions

about whether or not it was smuggling. It looked like there was some accusations by another researcher that it was like he was going to be using the DNA to make medicine or something. Oh, yeah. Which seemed little unlikely. But

I'm not sure whether there was any resolution to that. I haven't looked it up. Okay. Mostly because sometimes it's fun to live in mystery. But also it is like, yes, there are reasons that this country and their border patrol people have come up with for why these specimens shouldn't be exported. But the lack of communication sometimes between researchers and even academic institutions, institutions with the actual government of the country or countries that you're working in can sometimes hinder that like scientific access. So it's just as plausible that this guy

had been like working legally and responsibly and communicating with colleagues in Turkey and he potentially even had all the correct paperwork. But sometimes that lack of communication ends up with no one knowing what that paperwork should actually look like. I was in communication with a different researcher a couple years ago asking about his experiences with working in a different country and he was telling me all these things about how sometimes they would just change the paperwork year to year

just sort of on a whim and like trying to keep up to date with all of that for research that could technically could sometimes take years to actually like be processed through meant that it was like even more difficult to try and stay legal on things. And so yeah. And I think in the notes you said that that's one reason why like

you don't often accept thing, like at the front desk, people bringing things in, not just, oh, hey, I found this in my backyard, but like, oh, hey, I got this in this other country. And just because of how strict the laws are, someone could even have accidentally smuggled something over and not even realized it or something. And then the museum would be liable for that, right? Yeah, exactly. So, like, knowing and being sure of the provenance of this festival, and also, again, the ownership of the specimen is really important. With this person even claims that they are the owner of it because they collected it and they brought it to you.

Maybe legally they aren't actually if that specimen is from Mongolia and it doesn't actually belong to you. It belongs to the state of Mongolia as an example. Right. Because I know they're very, yeah. Yeah, because you have like China and Brazil as some examples. And at first my like cyanophobia alarm went off. I was like, wait, why not from China or why not from Brazil? Then you're just like, oh, it's not because we don't like those countries because they're extremely strict.

And you don't want to accident and take some stolen. Yeah, exactly. I think it's also not just Brazil. It's a lot of South American countries have adopted this legislation where like, where, the visiting researcher needs to have like official liaison with a researcher in the country and that like the specimen it's best if the specimen just doesn't leave the country at all and if you need to study it then you have to come there and like be constantly in contact with your liaison and like all that sort of stuff so it's very restricted and very closed off and again it's not because we don't like these

countries or their fossils. But yeah. Fuck these particular dinosaurs. We don't want them. No, we love them so much. You don't want to let them go. There was in one of the readings, it was a mention of taxonomy and border collection, and it was about protected species of goat, I want to say.

I think so. Jack. One of those. But anyway, what happened was one of those subspecies is protected. And people had, I guess, gone trophy hunting for one of the non-protected species. But because the main species name was in the paperwork, they were stopped at customs for having this particular subspecies, which I guess I suppose they would claim they didn't. but that brings us to like the question of taxonomy and I also wonder if a lot of these problems are just because I think it had something to do with like people being able to keep the things that they have

and I wonder if it wasn't so much at customs just like seizing things so often wouldn't it be such a problem if it's like oh well this is a bad person doing a bad thing let's take their stuff away for like four years while it goes through the courts and that creates like a terrible experience for for like trying to get new legislation through to actually fix these problems because then it creates like a lobby group that's like, oh, how dare you take away my weird yak that I killed? Yeah, exactly. But what about the way that taxonomy is done in sort of like rulemaking and legislation did you want to, did you want to, did you want to talk about. Is it about like the enforcement or did, did you have like an ideal system that you would imagine, like maybe leaving things more vague might be better? Yeah. I don't think I had any

particular, uh, focus when I was bringing these up. I just thought it was just very interesting questions to think about. Partially just because a lot of seized material, especially in Canada usually ends up in provincial museums. And so these are things that I'm somewhat familiar with. And like a lot of it is in the case of hunting. And people often going into areas specifically to hunt something, but then not actually being familiar enough with the thing that they are hunting to recognize that they've killed the wrong thing.

and like I think I was reading a story somewhere where someone went in to kill a specific kind of bird, like went into a, like a hunting area. And then like proudly came out with four of like some completely different bird, like going in to shoot ducks or something and coming out with like woodpeckers and being like, yes, all of these ducks in my truck that I've, I had the permit. to hunt and that I've like hunted legally and then they're not ducks but they are dead now I guess so it's almost like the damage is done and you can't really fix it but like legally they get prosecuted I guess just by not being able to take them away and I know it's an interesting concept when those things get to the museums is that the like the government that reaches out to the museums? Do the museums reach out to government?

Is it covered by legislation that like if an endangered species or something gets killed, then we have like a consultation process. So these things will automatically be considered by natural history museums? I'm not sure. In my experience, there's always already been some sort of like working relationship already. And usually. the museum will ultimately be the one making the decision about what the museum accepts. Sometimes things don't automatically get shipped to the museum.

If the museum is like, no, we don't actually need more red deer antler racks. Like, we're good for those right now. But sometimes there will be like nature conservancies who will like contact the museums and be like, hey, we have a lot of these birds. And in some cases, the museum will even be like, yeah, we can't actually take a lot of these birds right now. But if you send me a list of them, then like, how about we take just this one and this one? Because those are either rare in general or rare for that area or, you know, almost thinking of them more as like data points that are interesting to collect. Right.

in the readings, there was something about like ecologies. So when you're talking about a species that is in different ecological areas, it's hard to tell really what the distinction between those species are. So that the one was like bison, for example, their coats will look very, very different so that there actually is no subspecies of like Plains bison. They're all the same, but they look very different based on like if they're in captivity or not. So when you have situations like that, the museum wants data points on, I guess, this particular species was found in this area, which might have some ecological impact on, like, how we describe it taxonomically, right? Yeah. I don't know. I think I also say in my notes that a lot of taxonomy is fake, but.

Yep. especially when it gets to differentiating between species and even as someone who like went to several years of school for this I don't think I could even confidently tell you what a subspecies is and how it's different from a species probably because there are like

20 different definitions that people have all used for what exactly a subspecies is But I think the data points in particular at museums are location and specimen specific, but they can also be time specific as well. So if there has historically not been much of this certain species in this area, and then there suddenly is, then it is interesting to record that a species has turned up in an area. and then there suddenly is, then it is interesting to record that a species has turned up in an area. Or if the opposite, if a species has historically been in an area and then hasn't been cited or collected for a long time,

and then suddenly there is one, that could be a factor of why a museum would love to accept it as a specimen, or like again as a data point just so that all of this chronological data can be considered as well but some of that is very collecting biased

yeah I think at the museum sorry at the museum that I'm working at now a lot of the collections material for I think basically all of the natural history departments or divisions.

It's very focused on the south of the province. And then as soon as you start to move north, it's like, well, there's not much there, actually. We have so many little data points around here and especially around the capital of the province and everything. But as soon as you start to move north, like, suddenly, I guess no one has been out collecting data, even though these animals could potentially be. just be existing just fine up there.

Yeah, so there's a lot of collecting bias involved as well. Yeah, like that plus the taxonomy like reminded me. So like something we said on this podcast a lot is that like with taxonomies, it's like those are borders and borders like one are constructed and also necessitate a certain type of policing no matter what kind of border they are. And that includes things like definitions, right? And taxonomies. Like, taxonomy came about like, imperially, right, as a way of, like, classifying and dominion.

Like, this is not this. This is not this. Etc. Et cetera, et cetera. But species are very fuzzy to begin with, right? And like that plus, like, what the museum will or won't collect, what is or isn't seized, what animals are deemed appropriate to be somewhere or not. Like, one of my Twitter mutuals wrote this piece about.

is it spotted lanternflies, that thing that's in Pennsylvania that people are told to stomp because they're invasive. And this article is sort of arguing for like a queer reading of what an invasive species actually is.

Is it just because it makes things a little more annoying for human beings to live there? Or is it actually causing ecological harm? Or is any like harm that it's doing is just a profits for farms? for example, and it's not doing much else. And so this like queering of what it means for like a species to be considered invasive or not

is very dependent on like aesthetics and capital. Like is this harming profit or is this actually damaging an environment in a way that's bad for other animals in that area and stuff? And like with a spot or lantern fly, a lot of the time it's just not doing, much damage and it's just annoying. And so like this rethinking like this like queering of

species and like looking at both like definitions and fluid boundaries of what a species is but also what it means to be invasive. Like as you said, sometimes things are in a place and then they're not like species move that's natural.

So when do you demon invasive? Is it like kudzu where it's actually a problem or, you know. I was having a talk with the botany curator the other day about how I think she was hearing reports of, and I don't know the kind of plant it was, but it was a kind of plant that has existed in the province before, but is now starting to appear in other areas.

And it was being treated as an invasive species because it wasn't there before. When in reality, like, it's appearing there because of climate change. And as the climate and the environment changes to accommodate species

that weren't in one place, then shouldn't it be somewhat natural for them to start appearing in a place that is now suitable for them that doesn't automatically deem them invasive? Especially if, they were like, you know, already sort of in the area to begin with.

Like, yeah. It's not necessarily like a transplant from a different part of the world or whatever. Yeah. Jay, what you were talking about reminds me of those, there's this kind of, I'm sure it's in other states too, but at least here in Washington state, there's the deer versus farmers versus wolves thing. There was a big hullabaloo because a pack of, I don't know if they were endangered at the time or if they're endangered now, basically had been killed off by a farmer because they were killing the cattle that this farmer had. And there was a big ecological debate whether or not, you know, the farmer had the right to protect his property and profit with his cows against this endangered wolf species.

that was starting to repopulate. I think it was the North Cascade Mountains, which is, you know, right on the Canada, Canada-Washington border. And, you know, they were starting to come back, and that was starting to cause problems for farmers. But we want the endangered species to come back because that helps coal the deer problem that we have in these mountains

that is causing ecological harm. And, you know, and there's people who are going, you know, no, the farmer has the right to protect his property and his profit and other people. People are going, well, no, you shouldn't have, you shouldn't be able to kill these, these wolves for any reason whatsoever. And just like trying to find that balance between, yeah, like the capital problem of the farmer needing to make a living in this like remote area versus the ecological problem of the deer and the wolves being the natural predator of the deer. So like you said, you know, cougars aren't around anymore. So the deer overpopulate. Like it's the same kind of thing here. It's cougarer. and wolves aren't found here in these mountains anymore for a lot of different reasons. And yeah, like, what do you do about that when humans moving in, especially, you know, is thinking like nuisance species like squirrels and raccoons that live particularly in urban areas,

are they invasive or are they just well adapted to human environments, right? Like. Or like pigeons, you know. Or, yeah, pigeons. Higgins, I think, are a little different because they were domesticated first. But, you know, but yeah, like, I have squirrels in my ceiling right now. There's no pest control company in this area that apparently will get rid of squirrels. Rats, mice, they're all cool with, but apparently nobody takes care of squirrels.

And I'm like, is it because they're, like, really, like, wild animals? Like, they live here. I don't know if they're, like, an invasive kind of squirrel or, like, the natural squirrel that lives here. So it's just like, yeah, that that sort of taxonomy of evases versus whatever is really a matter of perspective in the same way that you say like species isn't real, which I loved that paragraph by the way, just like somebody is going to be really mad at me over this, but. I specifically talk to people who are very into systematics and they have I'm not a very competitive or combative person, so I'm willing to just let them have their opinion on this.

But some people do have very strong opinions about species and genera and families and orders and sub-families and sub-orders. And at a certain point, it really is just like, well, you can come up with a little name for the very specific group of animals. that you're talking about. And that's fine. And every name is going to find some exception that then they have to create another thing for because all of this isn't real. And you have to define things by what they're not, you know? Phylogenies just change because we get new information about how animals are related to each other. And so something that was in a certain group before, like now I guess,

due to new genetic sequencing or something maybe isn't part of that group anymore technically. So, yeah. Or maybe that group is paraphyletic, which I don't know if I have to try and explain to you. Now, I'm just imagining, like, non-human, like, museum eugenics or something with, like, looking genetically, this thing isn't this anymore. Yeah. I'm like, oh, that's got to be fucked up. Sometimes entomologists specifically get annoyed when people use the term bug

for things that are not technically bugs because there is a scientific definition of the word bug that entomologists love to know about that no one else hears it. Because isn't every insect a bug? Yeah, but they're not. I'm not willing to live. what they are though.

This is all very gender to me, like, thinking that, like, you know, like, well, it's your biological sex. Well, what is biological sex mean? Are we talking about chromosomes? Are we talking about genitals? Are we talking about ability to breed? Yeah, it's just... I mean, sexology happened at the same time that taxonomy started happening. Yeah. And originally, like, sexuality used to be thought of in, like, a taxonomical, like, treat. like they develop at the same time. It's like the same thought process. Like the like study of human sexuality and gender comes from, you know, people pinning down butterflies onto boards and stuff. It's the same thing is my hot take. That tracks. You speciize. It's a Foucault thing.

You speciate things. Like you create a species of something. So like a lesbian is a species. You speciate something. I think Judith Butler talks about that. too. Oh yeah. Yeah. Just makes me think of populations that speciate multiple times. So there's just a whole bunch of different species that arise from one population. Yeah. So you'd have like paraphyletic lesbians where like you're not including the subs, the, the, the, the, the populations that aren't included. And so like, like, he-him, lesbians are like paraphyletic. Yeah. Because they're not. To some phylogeny. Yeah.

And that's why taxonomy is bullshit. Is it the most parsimonious tree? I don't know. It's a little suss. Yeah, there's... What paraphyletic means now. I have a lot of, like, useless information of this in my brain because I used to watch a bunch of YouTube videos about axonomy to, like, just have in the background.

And so they played so many times. that I just memorized a lot of information about like cladistics. And so, yeah, that's why I know some of this. But there's like no, the way we classify things in like libraries is done entirely by like humans. But when you were talking about like defining species, it's done kind of in academic journals and not taxonomies. So then if you're trying to make like a taxonomy of something, you have to. to compare different peer-reviewed journals and people are just arguing about like when like when these things are subspecies or do we have to reorganize this entire tree because of new

genetic information or if you have if you don't have genetic information then like new fossil information or reinterpreting fossil information and you have to like just reorganize things because things are always the descendant of their ancestors so if you've got things that are not grouped with their ancestors, and that's a problem, and you've got to reorganize everything. The problem with it is, like, it's hierarchical. So taxonomy goes through a hierarchy, but it doesn't deal with... But it doesn't deal with time very well, because things evolve, species evolve over time. So if you imagine taxonomy hierarchy is like the X and Y axis, you need a Z-axis as well,

because, like, when does Homo erectus become homo-habelous? Well, it didn't. Like, There wasn't like a first species of them. And there's a word for that, like, if you, like, circled it on a phylogeny tree, like, the area in between, there's a word for that. And I have been forgetting what it is for years and I can't find it. The branch? No, like, it's, it involves things within the branch. Right. The area between nodes that might also include populations that weren't species.

these, I just remember an illustration of it in my mind, and I cannot remember what the word was. And it was, I know who I heard it from, too. It was PZ Myers, had to talk about it when he was talking about biologeny for some reason. Because I think he was probably doing some anti-creationist thing. But yeah, it was just this term for, like, explaining change through time, because the way we organize things are so hierarchical. like, you know, this is guerrilla gorilla, but then, oh, actually, this is guerrilla, gorilla mountainous or something, or, like, it, because that has ruined my favorite, like, fun fact, which is, like, what's the, what's the living creature that we use its scientific

name as its common name, which is a fun one? It's not guerrilla, but it's bella constrictor. Oh. Oh. Like the double-barreled name because all the other ones you'll think of are like gorilla, yeah, bison bison or gorilla gorilla. But if you want the genus in the species, it's boeux constrictor. We usually do that with dinosaurs, though, like T-Rex.

Yeah. But then boeot constrictors are boe-constrictor-constrictor constrictors because someone had to make a point about some species them. So now they're not bo-constrictors all the time. Someone had to make a point, I suppose. I mean, you've got to publish. And that's my taxonomy is bullshit. It was a really slow academic year. Someone had to get tenure, I guess.

Yeah. I just need one more paper. One more little one. I'm just going to act constrictor to Bo Constrictor. Just, you know, just girly things. Well, sometimes thinking about paleontology papers and how much the variety and how much evidence people need to create a new species of dinosaur or a new species of any fossil thing doesn't have to be a dinosaur there are fossil mammals too but like a lot of a lot of fossil species are usually just represented by like one specimen or one like group of specimens collected in a single area

or something like that. And it doesn't really make a lot of sense sometimes when you look at current populations of current animals, or current organisms, I guess, where there's a huge amount of variation between individuals and there's also a huge amount of variation between ages. And if you apply those same statistics to fossil organisms,

then like maybe this thing that you've put in a different genus, maybe it's actually just the juvenile of this other species. But there's no concrete way to like actually say that unless you like find some magical fossil site where, you know, you see things in situ as like this one being the parent of the juvenile or something like that. Like, it's almost a lot of paleontology is, yeah, a lot of paleontology is just waiting for, like, finding very specific pieces of evidence for something just so that you can, like, reinterpret what has already been established. Yeah, like, if we only had fossils of dogs, how would we classify them? Because of, like, the massive diversity in dogs, would we classify them as subspecies or completely different species? species or genuses if we had no genetic information. It's always a fun thought experiment. Definitely. I think it's like the same...

I was just thinking of in museums, in like extant zoology collections, you often have a lot of study skin specimens and then if, depending on how it was prepared, you also have the skeletons of those skins as like associated material.

But sometimes so many identification keys have been made to differentiate between species that have only been made on like exterior characteristics. So it becomes really difficult if you just have two skeletons of something. If you have like two different kinds of voles, for example, it can be really hard to tell them apart just from their skeletons or just from their skulls even because if like especially if you haven't been like studying voles for 10 years just because they do look so similar on the inside and they're all of the like information about differentiating them is like well if you look at the coat of this one then it's clearly different from the coat of this one and you're like but if I don't have a skin then how am I supposed to tell the difference yeah so because the opposite way of dogs

sometimes, or they're too similar. Yeah, the same thing with that bison, like wood bison versus plains bison, you would look at the coat on mammals, but bison are weird like that. So if we only had the fossils, we would have probably called it right, but since we can see their coats,

we classified them into more subspecies than was necessary. Yeah. Now, I've already made my thoughts clear on subspecies. I think they're fake and they exist to annoy me and ruin my fun facts. Yeah, I mean, I mean, it is like, like life doesn't fall in a neat categories. Like you have like ring species where you have like species that can all interbreed with each other next to each other. And they come back around and those two can't breed anymore. But everyone in between can interbreed. So yeah. Like are they a different species? Because they can breed with like. one next door and the one next door and the one next door, but then when they come and meet back around in an art, they can't interbreed anymore.

So. Yeah, that's a good point. I do love ring species. They're so funky. I just, I'm, I always think about like. Those are also usually something like salamanders, which are just funky in general. Yeah, salamanders are pretty funky. It reminds me of that like, meme of like the person on the beach right next to the water line.

like trying to like pin things down at the waterline and it's like humans and then it's like the complexities of something and then it's like the little things are pinning down it's like language or like something like that where it's like this like futile attempt to try to explain like the chaos of nature and we're just like I'm going to put my little rules on it. Yeah exactly to try to make sense of it. Like this is, This is something Louisa said in, I think, our episode of Party Girl, where labels and taxa and things like that are helpful inso far as they, like, are tools that help us understand, like, but not when they become prescriptive. You know, when they are, like, when they stop being tools, when they start being, like, rules, like, that's when we run into problems. So like a taxonomy of species could be useful, but when does it stop being useful and start just being like bureaucratic?

Yeah, that's good. A lot less fistfights than academia if people could get on board with that. Definitely. So I guess to pull it all together and do like a wrap up question, when it comes to like the role of museums in our society in terms of like the issues of classification, ownership and property. I mean, what would be in sort of an ideal world,

the role of museums and like, I guess helping us, what would museums be better off classifying the world or trying to do something more along the lines of advocating for a better understanding of, of like the migration patterns like you were talking about like are they better suited to doing one or the other or how would you imagine them working in a society if you could make it to your choosing?

It's a heavy question. I do think the way that a lot of museums are set up now is a very colonizing perspective. I've heard the argument a lot recently that museums are like part of the colonizing force basically, no matter where they're located. And because they've been sort of created to, created as spaces for things to be collected and owned

and things to be analyzed, but like from a distance, as in like distance from animals. or distance from the past or different distance from this other culture. And that's like part of one of the issues of decolonizing museums is that museums are just so many of them have been set up in this specific way that we only know how, like, this is the only way that we know how museums can exist. So I think, yeah, the ideal museum world would be one where

there isn't so much like there isn't so much of that distance and there is a lot more like understanding and a lot more like adaptability and fluidity and

a lot of the troubles that I think some museums encounter now are due to the strictness of the way they were set up the museum that I'm working at now was sort of made or like established in like the 70s or something but working at museums in the UK they've been established in the 1800s and like they've been working with systems that are just like

the way that they know how to function and at this point it's so hard to change to a different sort of system because they've had this buildup of you know centuries of functioning So I think finding a way to easily change would free a lot of museums from the problems that they have. And they're not even necessarily very overtly colonizing problems, if that makes sense. Sometimes they're just like, well, we've set up this cataloging number system that worked for us when we were a museum like 60 years ago. and when we had this many specimens, but now actually we have this many specimens and the ways that the specimens interact with each other

are a lot more complex than we thought they were. And it would be great if we weren't so restricted to this cataloging number system. I wish we could just have some big transfer to a new database so that we could renumber everything, or like, you know, something like that. So I think a museum that is more adaptable and fluid and is one that is better able to survive, I think, in the world.

And do you think that's because of the nature of, like, museums in particular because they've always been sort of private collection to prestige collection, like if museums were more focused as like a public service maybe that would solve? a lot of problems if they existed more in a public library ethos, would that allow us to keep specimens? Because I'm thinking, well, you could have like nature centers where you get to go explore nature now, but what about specimens from the past? So what could, what would be one of the ways we could ease up the museum restrictions? Yeah, I'm not sure. I do think that brings up a good point that like sometimes the public facing side of the museum is like again distanced from

the like research and collections side of museums that like of course you think of museums as a place where you can where the public can visit and learn about things and understand the collections but like not a lot of people realize how accessible the like collections part of it is. and how accessible collection staff want the collections to be. And if a lot more people were able to, like, contribute to museums, even especially in, like, the digital age, then I think that could help with some of the, like, public interaction and, like, learning and understanding and contributing and communicating with

natural history specimens or this is probably also applicable to human history specimens too. Like if I want to look at a cool rock with no reason other than I want to look at the cool rock, I want to be able to go look at the cool rock and not have to be doing like research. You know, I just want to see a cool rock.

Can I see it? Yeah. And so many, like, some of the best collections access, stories I've had have just been people who are like interested in seeing very specific things or and it's not even, not even very specific things, but sometimes they just come to the collections with a question of like, what kind of specimens do you have that are about, you know, about trees or like, or fossil trees or like fossil plants or something like that.

and sort of through communicating with this person, you sort of narrow it down to like what exactly they're interested in. And like, sure, I can pick a selection of trees through like geological time for you to like just see. And like no academic research comes from it or like, you know, no like huge scientific change or happens. It's just sort of, here's a person who is able to be curious about something. And I was able to help them be curious and ask more questions. Great. Richard, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Good night.