Discovery Online

Artifacts such as this animal scapula are vital for teaching anthropology students how to identify bones and recognize the many uses native peoples developed for such objects from their environments

So why do we keep all this stuff, anyway?

Collecting things seems to be a natural human tendency.  The first recorded collection by a human is a group of white pebbles gathered by someone who lived in a cave in France about 80,000 years ago.  While we will probably never know why this particular collection was made, we know that people collect things out of curiosity, as souvenirs, out of an interest in a particular subject, for aesthetic reasons, and even competitively (the Guinness Book of World Records lists the largest collections of all sorts of objects).

The collections described in this issue of UND Discovery are a bit different than your grandma’s collection of spoons from every state, your childhood collection of baseball cards, or my collection of Paul Bunyan figurines.  They are collections of objects and records that form the basis for study and research.  In most cases, they are made up of items that cannot be replaced or re-collected — at least in the absence of time travel.

Scientific collections form part of the infrastructure for science, which is based on the principle of being able to go back and replicate the observations or experiments of another researcher.  Collections of seeds are critical to global food security; an international vault in Svalbard, Norway, stores seeds for food crops as a resource for recovery from catastrophic damage to food production.  Geologists amass collections of rock and soil cores that are important to science, to agriculture, and to the mining and oil drilling industries.  Collections of documents are primary source material for historical research.  Collections of art are not only enjoyable to look at, but offer non-verbal expressions of all sorts of ideas and emotions.

UND has collections of all these kinds and more.  They are vital resources for research and creative activity and for education of future researchers and scholars.

Phyllis Johnson
Vice President for Research and Economic Development