Over the past few years the US Government has carried out several surveys of scientific collections and produced two very interesting reports that give a sense of the extent and diversity, as well as the scientific importance, of these resources. The first report is a survey of Federal Scientific Collections and can be found in the 2008 Archives of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/nstc/docsreports/archives) at:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/galleries/NSTC%20Reports/Revision_1-22_09_CL.pdf

The second report, which is based on an NSF survey, looks at collections that receive Federal Funding; about two thirds of those described in the report are affiliated with higher education collections. This report can be found at

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09044/nsf09044.pdf

Note that this NSF report is a short summary, and at the end it gives a URL to much more extensive data gathered from the survey.

These reports are important not just as baseline data about these collections, but because they lay part of the groundwork for a flurry of discussion and activity that is now taking place about capturing digitial representations various parts of these collections, and linking them together into national and international resources. I'll be sharing out pointers to some of these developments in coming months, and I also hope that we'll be able to highlight some of them at upcoming CNI meetings.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI