Good news, and bad news...

First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters.

Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of type specimens. Why this matters is that the very name of species depend on there being type specimens. Go read Catalogue of Organisms, an amazing blog in any case, on the matter.

More like this

Many ideas in the history of biology get going for reasons that have to do with agendas, ideologies, and plain old bad scholarship rather than the results of research. In particular, myths regarding the motivations of historical figures. I well remember Erik Erikson's execrable attempt to…
I was shown this today, and it totally rocks. ADS archives have gone back, just a wee bit... The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System, ADS, is one of the most amazingly useful and comprehensive scientific data bases on the planet. It covers all the major astronomical journals, including…
As promised, in this post I'm examining the "best practices" document (PDF) issued by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee in the wake of the "Aetogate" allegations. Here, I'll discuss the specific recommendations made in that document. And in an upcoming post, I'll…
It seems that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced the new publisher of it's flagship family of Science journals: AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner today announced the appointment of Kent Anderson, a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SPP), to serve…

It's always shocking to observe of closing of any kind archives (google groups <-//-> t.o, or real specimens..).

former t.o'ist
MrKAT from Finland

I don't know what's behind the economic problems of the herbarium, but I'd be curious to know if it has something to do with the recent drive for privatizing and "effectivizing". In other European countries, this has resulted in absurd situations when university buildings are given for free to new state-owned companies to manage, and they then charge market-based rent for the offices and labs, although in most cases the university has no real choice of location.