2024 Inventory of Micropaleontological Collections at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland

This inventory is a snapshot of continuous registry and documentation of the Micropaleontological Collections at the Natural History Museum in Basel (NMB), Switzerland over the period from 2002 through 2024. It comes in form of a "frozen" 7z archive of the homepage at https://www.micropal-basel.unibas.ch/Colls_NMB/MPCOLNMB.HTML as by 11 July 2024 (final datum). After download and unzipping the inventory expands to 159 MB of hyperlinked html, pdf, word or excel documents. The homepage launches by double clicking on starting file called MPCOLNMB.HTML using a standard web browser (for example Firefox).

As maintenance of the above homepage is not secured in future this frozen inventory is intended to aid collection managers and curators at NMB, as well as external visiting scientists to navigate through the status of holdings of micropaleontological collections and related archives at NMB until the above mentioned final datum in times when the NMB will undergo changes due to beforestanding movement into new buildings during the coming years.

In many museums change is the constant. This applies also to NMB and its collections and archives on different levels. Curation of museum collections is therefore subject to continuous modification. In the present case, physical storage facilities (rooms, location and type of compactus compartments, cabinets, drawers, shelves, display units, etc) of individual collections are unavoidable but will no longer be updated under www.micropal-basel.unibas.ch. With other words, physical storage locations of collections indicated in the small frame at the top right corner of the front page of the present "frozen inventory" described here reflect the state as by the above mentioned final datum. The same holds true for archival holdings (archive rooms, shelves, storage systems) that are often contextually closely related to individual collections. Also formats of documentation (digital versus analogue, data base systems) are exposed to strong changes because of galoping digitisation efforts. This has strong practical consequences for efficient accessibility of both, collections and archived content related to them, if the physical storage of specimens and storage of important analogue documentation (reports, correspondence, maps or fotos showing sampling locations, field books) occur at different rooms, different buildings, or even multiple repositories of an institution.

The preservation and storage of the collection's memory (archives) to specimens is especially important and should be physically as close together as possible because they are contextually related to each other. Often, there exist strong contextual relationships between collections of the same author or between different authors and their teams. Different types of collections (e.g., primary type collections, reference collections to publications, study collections, etc.) or collections from author to author, or sub-collections from the same author, are sometimes intimately linked to autho's or collector's specialist hand libraries, maps archives, image collections, obituaries, or other archival holdings. If collections are physically dislocated, for example due to space problems, which is a common situation in active collections, or during the forthcoming movement of the NMB into a new building in few years, this internal contextual connection is at risk to be lost if there is no detailed record of previous and new storage place. The present register of micropaleontological collections at NMB is by far not complete but represents a mind map of the author at retirement as by the above final datum. In this context the present "frozen inventory" may help to prevent loss of valuable internal memory between collections and archives and so may serve as a resource for "forward curation" and digitisation of collections and related archives during and beyond the transitional phase into NMB's future.