The Vasculum The Society of Herbarium Curators Newsletter Volume 15, Number 2: August 2020 Table of Contents Page Message from the President............................................................. 2 From the Editor..................................................................................4 Letter from the Past President......................................................... 5 News from the Society...................................................................... 6 UCR Bequest......................................................................................7 Adoption of LFCC by George Mason University Herbarium.....8 Leo A. Galloway Herbarium at Missouri Western State Univ......13 Early Career Advice (Richard G. Olmstead) .................................15 Featured Herbarium (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)..........20 SHC Worldwide (Radnaakhand Tungalag)....................................28 Consultation and Consent (Data Sovereignty Workshop)...........30 SHC at Botany 2020 — Virtual!........................................................32 Society Officers and Editorial Committee......................................36 The Society of Herbarium Curators (SHC) unites the world’s herbarium professionals in discussion, training, action, and support for the benefit of herbaria, science, and society. SHC envisions a network of innovative, well-trained herbarium professionals, empowered to recognize and ad- dress local and global stakeholder needs with organi- zationally sustainable strategies that advance the well-being of herbaria, science, and society. For more information, please join us online: — www.herbariumcurators.org — We invite you to become an SHC member by visiting: www.herbariumcurators.org/membership Annual Dues Student $5 Regular $10 Sustaining $25 Life $200 Join us online Message from the President Hello, Botanists! The initial days of my presidential term for the Society of Herbari- um Curators are certainly not as I had imagined! July 2020 and the prior months have been filled with numerous unforeseen challenges (professional, personal, and social) associated with COVID-19. At the same time, we find ourselves in somewhat of an extraordinary period of opportunity and phase of creativity: a time for all of us to learn new and innovative ways to curate and manage herbaria, interact with the public, com- SHC Website municate with our colleagues, and teach our students. I never thought that, in my life- www.herbariumcurators. org time, I’d be teaching a field course entirely online. But it happened. It was early April, and COVID-19 shut down all in-person learning at the University of Colorado, leaving me with three weeks to completely renovate my 2020 “Maymester” course, entitled The Lichen Biome. The task felt impossible, but with the help of Teaching Assistants Carly Anderson Stewart and Justin Williams, we frantically traversed and camped through Colorado’s wonderfully varied ecosystems, shooting 100+ educational videos and “vir- tual hikes” along the way. Our resulting YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aKLtkvjVa3A) seems to have been well-received by our students—who knew! Videos are no substitute for time spent in the field or herbarium, but time will none- Facebook www.facebook.com/ theless determine how effective are the teaching tactics we scramble to invent in light herbariumcurators of COVID-19. So, too, is COVID-19 impacting the work we do and time we spend as curators, collec- tions managers, data scientists, visiting researchers, and a cadre of absolutely amazing, dedicated student workers. Undergraduate herbarium technicians at COLO now geo- reference from home or work on other post-image processing remotely. Although gifts and loans have come to a temporary halt, our nation’s collections managers—some of the most talented botanists in the world—now find themselves with expanded field time, exploring new ranges, botanizing new grasslands, documenting new arrivals into Twitter urban ecosystems, in ways that prior summertime office responsibilities may have in www.twitter.com/ part stymied. The numerous data scientists who spearhead digitization efforts around socherbcurators the globe deserve enormous credit for helping us completely renovate our workflows and rewire our sometimes overly traditional museum brains. These individuals breathe new life daily into our now-online (hopefully soon-to-be back in-person) herbarium routines, constantly challenging the status quo. All of these actions serve to foster a new generation of herbarium junkies—botanists and students with a default passion for plants, but with new perspectives on the utility and role of herbaria in the 21st Century. These are the individuals who will introduce groundbreaking advances that we can’t fully wrap our heads around yet, much in the way collectors in the 1860s never knew their specimens might get used to reconstruct the industrial revolution. Linkedin COVID-19 has yielded a number of unexpected opportunities to the botanical com- www.linkedin.com/ company/18255007 munity at large. I write during the Botany 2020 — Virtual! conference, where meeting attendance is up in general, but one of the hallmarks is much broader international par- The Vasculum, Volume 15, Number 2 Page 2 ticipation made possible by our virtual presence. How cool is that!? This alone promotes new interactions among participants from all over the world. Moving into 2020–2021, diversity initiatives will be a major priority for SHC. The world has spoken, from the #MeToo movement to #BlackLivesMatter: will we not tolerate marginalization of any of our Society members. As a Society, we pledge long-term action toward combating discrimination, maltreat- ment, oppression, and violence against the many groups worldwide who have been targeted by repugnant acts of injustice and inequality. I welcome ideas and feedback from all SHC members—past, present, or future, student to retiree—regarding ways in which we can use these strange times to our advantage, in particular, to diversify and to include. I especially welcome ideas regarding how we can effectively create and disseminate a culture and an environment at SHC that promotes social justice for all, through the lens of what we do as a Society. Email me with your thoughts! 2020–2021 must be THE year of change! The 2020–2021 year will be busy on other fronts. Some of our major activities in the SHC will include acquiring an insurance policy for the Society, developing a multi-societal and potentially international task force aimed at establishing procedures for how to handle derogatory language on herbarium labels, beginning the process of constructing a guide to best practices in herbarium curation and management, and finally, continuing to build a nascent endowment. My sincere gratitude goes to SHC Past Presidents Patrick Sweeney and Austin Mast for initiating the establishment of SHC’s first endowment, in particular! It remains diminutive compared to long-es- tablished complements of other societies, but check back regularly, consider a donation, and watch it grow! The Society of Herbarium Curators welcomes donations to our new endowment of any sort, small or large. Thank you for your generosity! Huge credit also goes to former SHC Program Director Austin Mast for agreeing to continue to develop and run the Strategic Planning for Herbaria course for 2021. In the coming weeks, I will be soliciting member participation on several vacant committees. If you are interested in one of these (specifically: Member- ship, Grants, and Herbarium Assistance Committees) or know of a colleague who might be particularly fitting, please send an email. I would like to close by acknowledging the incredible efforts of the prior years’ Executive Board, Committee Mem- bers, and Members-at-Large. What has surprised me most about stepping into this position (other than learning the importance of keeping a timeline!) is just how much has been accomplished by these previous volunteer ef- forts. In particular, I’d like to thank Patrick Sweeney for his tireless efforts and leadership. During the prior two years, Patrick led advocacy efforts for imperiled herbaria such as that of the University of Alaska Museum of the North (ALA). He initiated an ad hoc committee and helped finalize SHC’s first Investment Policy. Patrick addi- tionally organized and co-hosted the Botany 2020 — Virtual! symposium entitled Biodiversity Research Collecting is More Important Than Ever. In addition to extensive work soliciting donations for our Society, he worked to draft a solidarity statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Black community. Last but not least, Patrick was instrumental in the establishment of the Society of Herbarium Curator’s first endowment. I have very much enjoyed meeting so many new faces at Botany 2020 — Virtual!, even if virtually, and many oth- ers through email exchanges and virtual mixers. Thanks to the entire SHC community for welcoming me to your botanical family! I hope to work hard and advocate for all—this and next year—and welcome your thoughts, opin- ions, criticisms, and feedback along the way! Erin A. Tripp Museum of Natural History, Curator of Botany University of Colorado—Boulder The Vasculum, Volume 15, Number 2 Page 3 From the Editor We find ourselves in a very different world than the one that we experienced last year when the summer edition of The Vasculum arrived in our inboxes. Although the challenges have been many, humanity collectively has been finding