Advice to Administrators of Systematic Collections

It is a great privilege to be asked to make a few comments at this final session of the Tenth Conference of this organization. As you know, I was somewhat involved in the genesis and first few years of your existence, if indeed an organization without officers and without a treasury can be said to exist. But here you are, the members of the organization, and so we must conclude that it does exist. After attending the first six of your meetings, on behalf either of the National Science Foundation or of the Smithsonian Institution, I skipped some years, and now your host for the present conference has kindly asked me to attend as an observer. In this capacity, I may say that I like what I observe, and I am delighted to see that the organization (which must be quite unique in its lack of form and its lack of finances) has such virility and plays such a consequential part in a very significant national activity. I remain one of those who strongly feel that systematic collections are the essential background of a vast area of scientific philosophy. As administrators of these collections, you have accepted a huge responsibility for the present and future well-being of an important segment of science, and your presence at these conferences shows that this responsibility is taken seriously. We hear a great deal these days about Parkinson's Law, which in some universities and doubtless in some museums is increasingly respected. Recently I have been thinking about a sort of corollary law, which I propose to call Smith's Law, even though it is already in very widespread unformulated practice. In its simplest terms, this Law may be expressed as: The less responsibility one has for administering a human activity, the better qualified one is to give advice about it. Doubtless because of his respect for this Law, even though he may not be aware of its authorship, your host asked me to share some advice with you. Well, actually, what he said was "make some remarks", but from my present irresponsible vantage point how can I interpret this but to give advice? ** I propose to limit my advice to two tendencies that seem to be developing in systematic collections, as I look back over the past decade: (1) the tendency of the organizations you represent to spread themselves pretty thin, and (2) the tendency to give away certain segments of your activities. Both of these tendencies derive from