Let me put in a brief aside here, The University of Kansas symbol is KU. Isn’t that backward, shouldn’t it be UK. But then would it be confused with the United Kingdom? Kansas State University, main campus in Manhattan Kansas, uses K-State, not KU or KSU. WTH is going on here?
Okay, back to museums.
If you have never visited the back rooms of museum collections it can be an interesting experience. I have done it a few times but this latest experience was by far the most up-lifting. Sometimes collections can be dusty, the air cruddy, and odiferous. Not the case at KU. Let me back up to another museum visit I made some years ago, the school / museum will remain nameless: I was asked to view some specimens of shells to determine the species and probable habitat (recent fossil shells). The museum rooms were dusty as hell, ugh. The boxes holding specimens were not labeled, the shelves were not labeled, the specimen boxes contained a small tag that referred to the location and that was it. I dutifully looked through the specimens and made some notes. Subsequently I wrote up a few paragraphs about the species present that I thought might be useful in speculating on the habitat. Apparently that didn’t follow the chosen hypothesis as “they” didn’t want the area to be wet so I guess they didn’t use this information (hmm).
And another time I was asked to identify some snails that folks were sure were invasive and career making / important and I could have walked them to the local pond to point them out…no let me get away from the negative science view of the data not following a coveted hypothesis and finish my brief story.
Back to KU:
Our hosts were fabulous. Helpful, friendly, asking questions, answering questions. The collections were well organized, well labeled, clean cabinet, and the current database was great, just missing species identifications (which is what we were doing there).
And, I saved the best for last, they had a mini-cappuccino machine that we could use. Coffee!
Though our visit was in winter temperatures were not awfully cold, and we didn’t have rain or snow to contend with as we drove the unfamiliar streets back and forth to our air B & B daily. We did get a chance to explore the University campus, awesome, and Lawrence just a little bit, nice spot. Appears to be a calm town with plenty to do.
The days were long, well not longer than a normal work day but longer than my lazy body was used to working these days. The whole process took less than a week. Now comes the task of integrating this dataset into the other states following the FWGNA project database structure, not super simply but easy enough via Excel functions and cutting and pasting.
Some action shots! or Lack of action shots?
I did not get a photo of the coffee maker that helped us so much, dang :-)