Greetings from the Colter Bay Curation Office in Grand Teton National Park. I am currently completing a "cultural resources" internship with Alice Hart, museum curator. I will be here through the second weekend in August. The project I am working on was "inspired" by a directive from the Department of the Interior, or, "the folks in Washington," who have mandated that National Parks step up their record keeping for scientific research being done in Parks. For example, 53 research permits have been issues since January 1, 2009 of those, only 13 permits are new, the rest are classified as "renewals," many of which are issued for longitudinal research. The products of this research, including (but not limited to): specimens, raw data, field notes, dissertations, journal publications, etc. are often lost in the shuffle. Although NPS requires Investigator Annual Reports (IAR's), the bulk of the data may end up in a professor's office, uncataloged and untraceable.  I believe NPS envisions a nationwide publicly accessible (that means you don't pay $40 for access to one journal article) database that includes records of all research completed within Parks--which are, after all, publicly owned.

My work has given me an administrative view of things. I have a working knowledge of research being done in Grand Teton, and better yet I currently live amidst many of those researchers at the AMK Ranch & Research Station run by the University of Wyoming. By interacting with "the butterfly people, "the bark beetle people," and the "bear aware" sociological survey team, I am able to understand the researcher's perspective, get a feeling for their pressures, and communicate more effectively with them when it comes to convincing them that their data is better off cataloged at their home institution than sitting in a milk crate in their lab.

While the government is all about asserting ownership of data produced on public land, I believe in its democratic purpose, which is to further education, scientific research, and the ecologic health of our world.

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