A new article published in Collection Forum explores the need for permit management within biodiversity collection management systems to digitally track legal compliance documentation. The paper discusses how the Nagoya Protocol mandates operating changes within U.S. biodiversity collections and describes how the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology has made changes to its procedures and museum-wide database, MCZbase (an independent instance of the Arctos collections management system), linking legal compliance documentation to specimens and transactions (i.e., accessions, loans).
We used permits, certificates, and agreements associated with MCZ specimens accessioned in 2018 as a means to assess a new module created to track compliance documentation, a controlled vocabulary categorizing these documents, and the automatic linkages established among documentation, specimens, and transactions, the authors note. While the emphasis of this work was a single year test case, its successful implementation may be informative to policies and collection management systems at other institutions.