As a humanities scholar, I think this point is highly relevant. Awareness is critical to ensuring that people understand the value and importance of collections and their management and care, including digital/specimen/management and data models that include linking etc. When I was Programme Director at the Centre for Collections Based Research at the University of Reading, I had interdisciplinary PhD students from across the humanities working in archives and collections: I always took them on a peripatetic tour of the University’s (impressive) collections. That meant going to the Herbarium and also to the Cole Zoological Collections. This really opened their eyes to the differences in collection management for, say, literary archives, and natural history collections. In some instances, this actually changed the design of their research questions and involved them more closed in nathist. All of them will remember those encounters forever. University collections have a huge role to play.
There are also senior researchers in environmental history, history of natural history, global history, and history of knowledge production who are not only aware, but spreading awareness of nathist collections and their value through their research (see below). Not only that, but many of these colleagues have the research skills and analytical ability to contribute to the kinds of data (transcriptions, collation of field notes with correspondence, etc) that are needed for the realisation of the dream of the Digital Extended Specimen. It will be critically important to include such highly skilled colleagues in the thinking behind the data models for the DES.
Further, many of these humanities colleagues who are already engaged with nathist collections are also quite advanced in processes of developing inclusion and diversity in their work – be that teaching, research, or decolonial practices. It would be great to share this kind of know-how across disciplines.
Some of us have started an international and interdisciplinary research group (albeit informal) and we have started a research blog about it. It is called ‘collection<>ecologies’ and here is the link: We are the Collection Ecologists – Collection Ecologies
But that is the tip of an iceberg – it would be worth planning an effective, well-structured consultation for GBIF with the humanities and social sciences communities. Happy to be part of that!