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. 2014 Nov 24:(456):139-46.
doi: 10.3897/zookeys.456.8862. eCollection 2014.

Italian natural history museums on the verge of collapse?

Franco Andreone  1 , Luca Bartolozzi  2 , Giovanni Boano  3 , Ferdinando Boero  4 , Marco A Bologna  5 , Mauro Bon  6 , Nicola Bressi  7 , Massimo Capula  8 , Achille Casale  9 , Maurizio Casiraghi  10 , Giorgio Chiozzi  11 , Massimo Delfino  12 , Giuliano Doria  13 , Antonio Durante  14 , Marco Ferrari  15 , Spartaco Gippoliti  16 , Michele Lanzinger  17 , Leonardo Latella  18 , Nicola Maio  19 , Carla Marangoni  8 , Stefano Mazzotti  20 , Alessandro Minelli  21 , Giuseppe Muscio  22 , Paola Nicolosi  23 , Telmo Pievani  21 , Edoardo Razzetti  24 , Giorgio Sabella  25 , Marco Valle  26 , Vincenzo Vomero  8 , Alberto Zilli  27
Affiliations

Italian natural history museums on the verge of collapse?

Franco Andreone et al. Zookeys. .

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.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Italy; metamuseum; natural history museums.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The herpetological gallery at the Museo di Storia Naturale, University of Florence (photograph by S. Bambi).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
A technician caring at the entomological collection at the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Verona (photograph by L. Latella).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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