Nature has an interesting story on the future of museum collections.  It's ironic that at a time when we need the collections to track Earth's shrinking biodiversity.  The collections themselves are becoming more and more endangered.  For various reasons, most having to do with drops or shifts in funding.  There has been a reduction in curatorial staffs and a new emphasis on molecular techniques.  In addition, many museums are concentrating on education and entertainment instead of basic research.

In 1758, with the publication of the encyclopaedic Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus attempted to classify nature — an effort that continues today at almost 8,000 natural-history collections around the world. The United States alone holds an estimated 1 billion specimens, and the global figure may reach 3 billion. The average institution displays only about 1% or less of its store. The rest — often hundreds of thousands of specimens — is catalogued and stored away, inaccessible to the public.

The collections are overseen by a dwindling corps of managers and curators — mainly taxonomists who describe species, and systematists who study the relationship between organisms. The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, had 39 curators in 2001. Today, there are just 21. At present, there is no curator of fishes — an enormously diverse class of animal. Neither The Field Museum nor the AMNH — which hold two of the largest collections in the world — has a lepidopterist on staff, even though both collections contain hundreds of thousands of butterfly and moth specimens. Similarly, the National Museum of Natural History has seen a steady drop in the number of curators — from a high of 122 in 1993 to a low of 81 last year.

The decline is not limited to the United States. “The situation in the United Kingdom is the same, or worse,” says Paolo Viscardi, chair of the UK-based Natural Sciences Collections Association and a curator at the Horniman Museum in London. Commonly, a museum will restructure its staff, replacing three or four curatorial positions with a single collections manager, and sometimes an assistant. That manager might cover every discipline, from contemporary art to the natural sciences.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, many institutions are operating with smaller budgets. The few museums that get significant numbers of research grants have shifted their science focus to molecular techniques, which are better funded than more traditional taxonomic approaches. Many museums are emphasizing education and entertainment as they cut back on curatorial staff, says Scott Schaefer, associate dean of science for collections at the AMNH. Schaefer says that he has seen significant changes in many natural-history museums since 2008. “They tend to shift away from the conduct of research to simply the telling of the story of the sciences, in the same way that Walt Disney Company may represent science as entertainment,” he says.