Help needed - Have you heard of these institutions?

[mgrosjean]

A lot of the curation on the Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl) is country-dependant. We have “editors” in charge of reviewing suggestion updates for a given country.

So in order to facilitate the GRSciColl curation, @Kumiko and I have tried to assign countries to every GRSciColl institution entry. We managed for most entries but there are a few remaining ones where we need help.
Some might be just international, some might be misspellings, we aren’t sure. If you have heard of those, please let us know!

See the list:

• International Cooperative Project for Description and Deposition of Type Cultures
• Cameroon University, Museum of Zoology, which, we suspect could be a misspelling of the Cameron University → given the paper in the comment below seems to confirm it would be an institution name misspelled.
• Jay S. Haft Collection, could this be a private collection? → this one seems to be in the US, see the comment below
• De La Villa, Francisco, perhaps a private collection too?
• Asian Network on Microbial Researches, this seems like an international organisation but I cannot find any website nor address for headquarters.
• Centre for Applied Mycological Studies → This one seems to be in South Africa (see comment below)
• N. R. Whitney Collection, is it a personal collection?
• Museum National Historie Naturelle, it sounds like the National Natural History Museum of a French speaking country but which one? → I got enough feedback to feel confident that this entry is likely a misspelling of the Natural History Museum in Paris so I merged it with this other entry
• Herbarium Filicium
• Joint Soviet Mongolian Paleontolgical Expedition, I did find this article: Lopatin, A.V. To the 50th Anniversary of the Joint Russian-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition. Paleontol. J. 53 , 215–227 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0031030119030079 but in that case, should we leave the entry as it is or split it per country?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[sformel]

This is a fun detective hunt! I was able to find a few bits of evidence:

• I agree that Cameroon is probably Cameron University (US) based on this article containing the same acronym that is in the registry: https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/OAS/article/view/5695/5319
• Jay S. Haft is maybe a private collection, but at least it sounds like it’s in the US: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228816403_Collections_of_Recent_Mammals_in_North_America
• Centre for Applied Mycological Studies is South Africa: https://repository.up.ac.za/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2263/29436/dissertation.pdf
• The Joint Soviet Mongolian Paleontological Expedition: This is a tough one. I found similar articles (The Largest Expedition in the Practice of World Paleontological Science The 50th Anniversary of the Joint Russian‒Mongolian Paleontological Expedition | SpringerLink) that describe the expedition populating museums in Russia and Mongolia, as well as training many scientists from those countries. Are there any analogous joint ventures in grscicoll?

[mgrosjean]

Thank you @sformel, this is most helpful! I have updated some of the entries based on the documents you shared.
The one I am not sure how to handle is the Expedition. There are other expeditions on GRSciColl: GBIF Registry but in the other cases, there is the possibility to tie the output of these expeditions to a specific location or country. Maybe we could consider leaving that one entry country-less.

In any case, many thanks again for the investigation work!

[kcopas]

I think it’s extremely odd that an expedition is listed as if it’s a single collection somewhere, which would very much make it an exception.

Voyager, which shared third prize in the 2020 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, displays what’s more commonly the rule.

[sformel]

First, @kcopas thanks for sharing Voyager! I had never seen it before and it’s very cool.

@mgrosjean Not sure if you had access to the article you linked, I can email it to you if you don’t. It sounds like the collection resides in two possible places:

The fully coordinated joint research work has been performed by the Paleontological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (currently the Borissiak Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, abbreviated as PIN) and the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Mongolian People’s Republic (Paleontological Center of the Academy of Sciences of Mongolia, now the Institute of Paleontology and Geology of the ASM.

So perhaps it is worth dissolving the JRMPE and pointing records to PIN and either UBA or PSS or MGI?

[DavidFichtmueller]

@mgrosjean

Museum National Historie Naturelle

seems to be pretty close to the “Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle” in Paris, however with a missing accent and article (d’) and the mixed order of “ir” in “Histoire”. It looks a bit like a non-french speaker tried to write the name of the institution.

[mgrosjean]

Thanks David, I think you might be correct, I merged the entry with the entry for the museum in Paris