The Research Coordination Network (RCN) for Building a National Community of Natural History Collections was started as a way to build communication among people at natural history collections, researchers using those collections, other programs dealing with issues important to collections, and other stakeholders. Foremost, our goal is to build community among natural history collections. To do so, we are developing this site, CollectionsWeb, and we hope that it will serve as an online hub for collections based activities.

We will develop a number of web resources as the RCN progresses and they will be available through this portal. We also plan to provide links to many other collections based resources. As part of the RCN we will also host a series of workshops and symposia dealing with issues of importance relating to collections. We will also be sponsoring two types of internships: one for students interested in researching best practices, to be administered by our partner organization, the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, and the other for students doing novel, interdisciplinary, specimen-based research. As all of these activities develop, you will be able to find out more information on how to get involved here at CollectionsWeb.

For more information about the RCN, please read the NSF proposal or the Project Summary from the proposal for a brief introduction. To find out who we are you can learn about the Steering Committee and the Core Participants.

The National Science Foundation Grant (NSF - 0639214) was made to Michigan State University (Alan Prather, PI). Subcontracts were awarded to Tulane University (Henry Bart, co-PI) and the Natural Science Collections Alliance. The project is coordinated through the Michigan State University Herbarium and Department of Plant Biology.