Welcome to CollectionsWeb, the website of the Research Coordination Network (RCN) for Building a National Community of Natural History Collections . At CollectionsWeb you can find out general information about the RCN and find out how you can get involved in the activities of the RCN. Please refer back to CollectionsWeb.org for up-to-date information and resources.

CollectionsWeb Selects Research and Best Practices Interns for Summer 2010: Rebecca Jana will be working with Paul Tinerella at the Illinois Natural History Survey on "The ticks (Acari: Ixodoidea) of Illinois: An WWW resource for specimen occurence data, faunistics, and epidemiological associations" and Melissa Barton will be working with Elizabeth Leith and Marcia Revelez at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on developing an overview of best practices in natural history collections to aid the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections in planning for research into best practices.

Scientific Collections International (SciColl) is the new international mechanism proposed by an activity under the OECD Global Science Forum on policy issues related to scientific collections. SciColl has released a report from the Conference in Brussels on 8-9 February, which will be of interest to many of you.

Museum Education: Suggestions for the education programs to be highlighted in CollectionsWeb inventory of innovative and successful educational programs are welcome. In the next few months we will go online with the first entries in our series on museum education. The highlighted programs will incorporate collections or collections research. Not only will programs at major museums be highlighted, but also programs at universities, local museums, nature centers and botanical gardens that use collections. If you have suggestions for programs to be highlighted, please send them to Grace Krause (krausegr@msu.edu) .