From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2018.
Melinda Peters, a staff member of the Core Collections Management team, will be leaving the National Museum of Natural History to take a position at the U.S. National Arboretum as the volunteer manager for the Friends of the National Arboretum. Peters joined the Department of Botany in 2013. Peters filled many roles during her short tenure here. She took over the volunteer mounting program and greatly expanded it. There are now 22 volunteers mounting plants on a regular schedule and 20 intermittent volunteers. Over the 5-year period, her volunteers mounted over 90,000 specimens. She was a mentor to several interns and conducted plant mounting courses for interns across the museum each summer. Peters was involved as a Botany representative with exhibit planning and with policy initiatives affecting the department. She became a scientific scuba diver and was part of a collecting expedition in Hawaii. She constantly managed and reduced the backlog of specimens for mounting and exchange. Her efforts made a significant contribution to the role the herbarium plays for the department.
Laura Tancredi, a staff member of the Information Management team, will be leaving the National Museum of Natural History to take a position at the National Museum of American History as a museum specialist in the Exhibitions and Collections Management Office. Tancredi began at Natural History in 2012 and joined the Department of Botany in 2016. Within a short period of time, she learned and embraced the upkeep and management of the digitized collection data, and created documentation of the Botany data entry workflow, policies and standards. Tancredi was also in charge of all Smithsonian Transcription Center botany projects, and hosted a number of interns under a “Digitization Strategies” internship.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.