Dear Taxacom-readers,

It is getting more and more necessary for taxonomists to demonstrate that they are useful and used. This does not only apply to the individual scientists, but also to institutions with taxonomic collections, such as museums and herbaria.

In an attempt to live up to that increasing demand for documentation, the leadership of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has issued an order to its curatorial staff - The staff members are requested to document which publications from 2011, written entirely by external scientists, that in one way or another are based on material in the collections of the Museum. It is added that "this may be difficult, but very important for the documentation of the use of the collections. Try to get all the scientists that borrow material to inform you about their publications and supplement this information with your own search within reasonable limits."

To find publications that are based on collections in the Natural History Museum of Denmark is indeed a difficult task. As curator of the herbarium of vascular plants at the Museum, I know that my particular section of the Museum has 950 outstanding loans to scientists all over the world, including institutions in the developing countries. The loans of herbarium specimens are normally made to institutions, not directly to individual scientists, so even if I wrote to all 950 and asked them if they have published anything on our collections in 2011, I am not sure that the message would reach all.

A more practicable solution might be to use digital search for electronic publications that quote the herbarium acronym. However, for the herbaria of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, which is situated in Copenhagen, this acronym is "C". We have normally been rather proud to be an old institution that has a single character as its acronym, but in this case it is rather unfortunate, like it must be for other well known herbaria with acronyms like "A", "B", "E", "F", "G", "H", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "U", "V", "Y" and "Z".

In publications, material from our herbarium at "C" is normally referred to in text strings of one of the following forms: "(C)", "(C, ", ", C," or " C)". But a search in for example Google Scholar or other search engines result in overflow of thousands and thousands of hits, even when these text strings are combined with other relevant words such as "botany", "plants", etc. - It can be added that this is a specific problem for the botanists - the curators of the zoological and geological collections are lucky that their collections have acronyms with a characteristic sting of four letters.

Has any of the Taxacom-readers good ideas about how it might be possible to specifically document answers to the (unfortunately relevant) question about the use of the botanical collections of the Copenhagen Natural History Museum - and of other herbaria with similarly insignificant acronyms?

Hoping for a good idea and with best wishes,

Ib Friis Professor, dr. scient., curator of vascular plants Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen ib...@snm.ku.dk

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