Stemming the Tide: Global Strategies for Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Climate Change

Climate change has become one of the most significant and fastest growing threats to cultural heritage around the globe. Yet cultural heritage sites and collections also serve as invaluable sources of resilience for communities to address climate change. In March 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Collections Program convened the symposium “Stemming the Tide: Global Strategies for Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Climate Change” to empower cultural heritage authorities, managers, and advocates to pursue more ambitious engagement and collaborative approaches to climate change. Speakers explored six categories of cultural heritage identified by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS): Cultural Landscapes and Historic Urban Landscapes, Archaeological Sites, Built Heritage (Buildings and Structures), Cultural Communities, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Museums and Collections. <div><br></div><div>Contributors: Jean Carroon, Antonietta Catanzariti, Carl Elefante, Nicole Heller, Victoria Herrmann, Amber Kerr, Ken Kimmell, Adam Markham, Henry McGhie, Jenny Newell, Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo, Erin Seekamp, Sarah Sutton, Alison Tickell, William G. Tompkins, Meredith Wiggins, Ashley Robbins Wilson, Janene Yazzie</div>

Stemming the Tide: Global Strategies for Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Climate Change

Climate change has become one of the most significant and fastest growing threats to cultural heritage around the globe. Yet cultural heritage sites and collections also serve as invaluable sources of resilience for communities to address climate change. In March 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Collections Program convened the symposium “Stemming the Tide: Global Strategies for Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Climate Change” to empower cultural heritage authorities, managers, and advocates to pursue more ambitious engagement and collaborative approaches to climate change. Speakers explored six categories of cultural heritage identified by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS): Cultural Landscapes and Historic Urban Landscapes, Archaeological Sites, Built Heritage (Buildings and Structures), Cultural Communities, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Museums and Collections. <div><br></div><div>Contributors: Jean Carroon, Antonietta Catanzariti, Carl Elefante, Nicole Heller, Victoria Herrmann, Amber Kerr, Ken Kimmell, Adam Markham, Henry McGhie, Jenny Newell, Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo, Erin Seekamp, Sarah Sutton, Alison Tickell, William G. Tompkins, Meredith Wiggins, Ashley Robbins Wilson, Janene Yazzie</div>

Natural History, Exploration, and Landscape in 19th-Century Chile

In the early 19th century, in recently independent Chile, a symbiosis emerged between various governments, on the one hand, and Chilean and foreign naturalists, on the other, who all realized that there was much to learn about Chile scientifically, and that this scientific knowledge had a range of uses. This joint interest resulted in state-sponsored projects and private trips that included mapping, investigating Chile’s natural resources, and gathering flora and fauna for cataloguing, collecting, and exchanging. Traveling naturalists, government-sponsored surveyors, amateur enthusiasts, and foreign visitors journeyed through Chile by foot, mule, horse, boat, and, eventually, train, heading north and south, to the mountains, plains, desert, and coast, in small and large groups, appropriating local knowledge, gathering materials, taking measurements, and writing letters, reports, and books on what they found, who they met, and what opportunities these regions offered. These trips contributed to the development of museums and collections in Chile and beyond, and to the discipline of natural history in Chile. Moreover, the circulation of objects and publications, not just in Chile but transnationally, brought Chile’s flora, fauna, and geography to greater international awareness and also into scientific discussions. This natural history work also contributed to cultural change and territorial expansion, generating ideas about territories as hospitable or hostile, dreary or picturesque, offering opportunity or being without development potential. As these naturalists and explorers built on each other’s opinions, they created an accepted narrative about particular landscapes and geographies that moved into other arenas. In the 1840s and 1850s, one of these narratives was that the southern region of the indigenous Mapuche people, militarily occupied and incorporated into Chile (1860–1883), was both a landscape of impenetrable forests and constant rain and a picturesque landscape of fertile opportunity for Chilean national development, presuming the “right” settlers could be attracted. Meanwhile, the arid north, including the Atacama Desert, over which Chile went to war with Bolivia and Peru (the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884), was depicted as hostile, monotonous, and dangerous, with little aesthetic merit, but also as a region that offered opportunities through its mineral wealth. The snow-capped Andes and fertile valleys of central Chile, in which the capital Santiago and the main port city of Valparaíso are located, became landscapes that represented the nation. Thus, naturalists contributed to greater scientific knowledge about Chile, building collections and inserting new flora, fauna, and geography into global scientific debates, while also creating draft meanings about particular landscapes and regions that spread well beyond natural history.

Santa Blandina copper mine, São Paulo State, Brazil

This article aims to retrieve the history of Santa Blandina's remarkable copper deposit in the Itapeva region, in the southeastern state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was discovered in 1941 by João Baptista Anhaia de Almeida Prado. The approach adopted here contemplates the genesis of mineralization and mainly its importance as a source of beautiful mineral specimens for museums and collections. Until the end of the 1960s there was a large cavern in a mineralized lode in limestones of the Açungui Group, with an internal space of around 100 m3, with the ceiling, walls and floor covered with stalagitic and mamelonar malachite, as well as some chrysocolla and azurite. This cavern was destroyed along with precious specimens, at a time when the lack of interest in preserving these rarities was remarkable, causing the loss of a unique mineralization of its kind.

Slinging With Four Giants on a Quest to Credit Natural Historians for our Museums and Collections

Bionomia, https://bionomia.net previously called Bloodhound Tracker, was launched in August 2018 with the aim of illustrating the breadth and depth of expertise required to collect and identify natural history specimens represented in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This required that specimens and people be uniquely identified and that a granular expression of actions (e.g. "collected", "identified") be adopted. The Darwin Core standard presently combines agents and their actions into the conflated terms recordedBy and identifiedBy whose values are typically unresolved and unlinked text strings. Bionomia consists of tools, web services, and a responsive website, which are all used to efficiently guide users to resolve and unequivocally link people to specimens via first-class actions collected or identified. It also shields users from the complexity of casting together and seamlessly integrating the services of four giant initiatives: ORCID, Wikidata, GBIF, and Zenodo. All of these initiatives are financially sustainable and well-used by many stakeholders, well-outside this narrow user-case. As a result, the links between person and specimen made by users of Bionomia are given every opportunity to persist, to represent credit for effort, and to flow into collection management systems as meaningful new entries. To date, 13M links between people and specimens have been made including 2M negative associations on 12.5M specimen records. These links were either made by the collectors themselves or by 84 people who have attributed specimen records to their peers, mentors and others they revere. Integration With ORCID and Wikidata People are identified in Bionomia through synchronization with ORCID and Wikidata by reusing their unique identifiers and drawing in their metadata. ORCID identifiers are used by living researchers to link their identites to their research outputs. ORCID services include OAuth2 pass-through authentication for use by developers and web services for programmatic access to its store of public profiles. These contain elements of metadata such as full name, aliases, keywords, countries, education, employment history, affiliations, and links to publications. Bionomia seeds its search directory of people by periodically querying ORCID for specific user-assigned keywords as well as directly though account creation via OAuth2 authentication. Deceased people are uniquely identified in Bionomia through integration with Wikidata by caching unique 'Q' numbers (identifiers), full names and aliases, countries, occupations, as well as birth and death dates. Profiles are seeded from Wikidata through daily queries for properties that are likely to be assigned to collectors of natural history specimens such as "Entomologists of the World ID" (= P5370) or "Harvard Index of Botanists ID" (= P6264). Because Wikidata items may be merged, Bionomia captures these merge events, re-associates previously made links to specimen records, and mirrors Wikidata's redirect behaviour. A Wikidata property called "Bionomia ID" (= P6944), whose values are either ORCID identifiers or Wikidata 'Q' numbers, helps facilitate additional integration and reuse. Integration with GBIF Specimen data are downloaded wholesale as Darwin Core Archives from GBIF every two weeks. The purpose of this schedule is to maintain a reasonable synchrony with source data that balances computation time with the expections of users who desire the most up-to-date view of their specimen records. Collectors with ORCID accounts who have elected to receive notice, are informed via email message when the authors of newly published papers have made use of their specimen records downloaded from GBIF. Integration with Zenodo Finally, users of Bionomia may integrate their ORCID OAuth2 authentication with Zenodo, an industry-recognized archive for research data, which enjoys support from the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). At the user's request, their specimen data represented as CSV (comma-separated values) and JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) documents are pushed into Zenodo, a DataCite DOI is assigned, and a formatted citation appears on their Bionomia profile. New versions of these files are pushed to Zenodo on the user's behalf when new specimen records are linked to them. If users have configured their ORCID account to listen for new entries in DataCite, a new work entry will also be made in their ORCID profile, thus sealing a perpetual, semi-automated loop betwen GBIF and ORCID that tidily showcases their efforts at collecting and identifying natural history specimens. Technologies Used Bionomia uses Apache Spark via scripts written in Scala, a human name parser written in Ruby called dwc_agent, queues of jobs executed through Sidekiq, scores of pairwise similarities in the structure of human names stored in Neo4j, data persistence in MySQL, and a search layer in Elasticsearch. Here, I expand on lessons learned in the construction and maintenance of Bionomia, emphasize the criticality of recognizing the early efforts made by a fledgling community of enthusiasts, and describe useful tools and services that may be integrated into collection management systems to help churn strings of unresolved, unlinked collector and determiner names into actionable identifiers that are gateways to rich sources of information.

SAFE MUSEUMS, SAFE COLLECTIONS. A SELECTION OF ARTICLES BY PIOTR OGRODZKI, NIMOZ LIBRARY, VOL. 13, WARSZAWA 2020

Safe Museums, Safe Collections. A Selection of Articles by Piotr Ogrodzki is a publication discussing the contemporary problems of crimes against heritage objects. The essays written over the period of 20 years were systematically published in the ‘Cenne, Bezcenne/Utracone’ journal, the only periodical dedicated to the recovery and restitutions of the lost national heritage. The publication is composed of 18 papers characterizing selected threats to museums and collections. All the presented texts oscillate within the semantic concepts related to crime and theft in museums and sacral facilities. The essays aptly juxtapose legal aspects with the practices of the protection of national heritage, while the described examples of security measures have been and will remain applicable also in the future. The additional value of the publication of Piotr Ogrodzki’s texts is their translation into English. Although many of the described thefts of art works have taken place in Poland, the Author also points to similar circumstances of such crimes in Europe. Enriched with Piotr Ogrodzki’s short biography and bibliography, the book begins with the papers by Piotr Majewski, Paulina Florjanowicz, Kamil Zeidler, and Jacek Rulewicz. It concludes with the message of Chief Inspector Adam Grajewski of the Polish Police Headquarters under a meaningful title In Lieu of an Afterword. Museum Collection Safety. The publisher of the book, the National Institute for Museums and Public Collections, NIMOZ, should be acknowledge for the noble idea of publishing this book, thus commemorating the outstanding individual that Piotr Ogrodzki was.

UNIVERSITY MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY. SEARCH FOR NEW REGULATIONS IN THE CONSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE

Resorting to the example of the Jagiellonian University (UJ), the Author discusses the topic of the bodies that are guardians of academic heritage within the structure of public tertiary education. In the first part of the paper the distinction between a museum and a collection is introduced, and the brief profiles of selected units of the Jagiellonian University are provided. In the next section definite examples are given of conducting scientific processes in museums and collections. In the context of the new Law on Higher Education and Science amendments that appear in reference to university museums and collections are discussed. The collections of museum units curating the academic heritage stem from the fundamental activity of the Jagiellonian University consisting in education and conducting research. These units operate within the University structure, this confirmed in the Charter which the Constitution for Science has made the major document regulating the university internal system. The Charter of the Jagiellonian University as a university running 13 museum units has been analysed. The search for the concepts related to identity, academic heritage, and museums in the content of the Charter, resulted in the identification of a new category: units running ancillary activity of museum-like character.

Museum, Not Temple

A Museum is not a temple but a place giving an ethical, moral framework to the meeting of people and cultural assets. Museum's outfitting must be able to make visitors understand, without any further mediation. Two aspects are shown: the need to be suitable for early childhood and the capacity of being a reference of citizenship. For centuries, some Museums and Collectors have used illegal digs as a source to acquire antique objects, with the result that most Museums and Collections possess a large amount of objects with no trace of their provenance. The countries of origin, on the other hand, feel deprived of their past. There is a change necessary: a change in how to deal with ancient objects, which should be presented because of their historical evidence. A new way of dealing with objects is possible: examples of new collaborations between the officials of the Countries of origin and the Museums are given. In the new ways of working in the culture sector the public will be the profiteer, beginning with everyone's own personal experience.