Italian natural history museums on the verge of collapse?

By

Andreone, Franco
Bartolozzi, Luca
Boano, Giovanni 1952-
Boero, Ferdinando
Bologna, Marco A. (Marco Alberto), 1954-
Bon, Mauro
Bressi, Nicola
Capula, Massimo
Casale, Achille
Casiraghi, Maurizio
Chiozzi, Giorgio
Delfino, Massimo
Doria, Giuliano
Durante, Antonio
Ferrari, Marco
Gippoliti, Spartaco
Lanzinger, Michele
Latella, Leonardo
Maio, Nicola
Marangoni, Carla
Mazzotti, Stefano
Minelli, Alessandro
Muscio, Giuseppe
Nicolosi, Paola
Pievani, Telmo
Razzetti, Edoardo
Sabella, Giorgio
Valle, Marco
Vomero, Vincenzo
Zilli, Alberto

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2014

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

456

Pages

139-146

Subjects

Biodiversity , Italy , metamuseum , Natural history museums

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.456.8862

 

Abstract

The Italian natural history museums are facing a critical situation, due to the progressive loss of scientific relevance, decreasing economic investments, and scarcity of personnel. This is extremely alarming, especially for ensuring the long-term preservation of the precious collections they host. Moreover, a commitment in fieldwork to increase scientific collections and concurrent taxonomic research are rarely considered priorities, while most of the activities are addressed to public events with political payoffs, such as exhibits, didactic meetings, expositions, and talks. This is possibly due to the absence of a national museum that would have better steered research activities and overall concepts for collection management. We here propose that Italian natural history museums collaborate to instate a “metamuseum”, by establishing a reciprocal interaction network aimed at sharing budgetary and technical resources, which would assure better coordination of common long-term goals and scientific activities.