Krishna Shenoy, a project archivist at the Fort Worth Botanical Garden, is our next recipient of the State Partnerships and Outreach Fund in support of her workshop at the 2025 meeting of The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, titled “Collaborations between biological collections and archives: Creating the Carlquist Extended Specimen Network.” Krishna and her co-presenters will introduce a new initiative in the digitization of biological collections and scientific archives known as the Extended Specimen Network (ESN), which connects biological specimens to archival documents like field notes, photographs, maps and more. Through an NSF grant, the Herbarium at the California Botanic Garden and the Library at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas in Fort Worth applied the ESN framework to over 190,000 collection objects of the American botanist and photographer, Sherwin J. Carlquist. The ultimate goals of the partnership are to facilitate long term preservation, digitization, link data across all biological collections and archival objects, and publish the collection for the public. The workshop will emphasize the importance of archival collections to biological collections and teach participants about working with archivists, using finding aids, and the stages of archival processing.

Established by SSA in 2021, the State Partnerships and Outreach Fund helps cover SSA members’ costs (up to $600) when presenting on archival topics to non-archival audiences. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, and we still have some money to give away! You can find more details on the fund and instructions for the application here: https://societyofsouthwestarchivists.wildapricot.org/State-Partnerships-Outreach-Fund