WISCONSIN STATE HERBARIUM

Herbarium Policies

Access to collections.  Any visitor, professional or amateur, or any member of the public, can examine specimens once they check in with and are oriented by a member of the Herbarium staff and receive instruction as to the proper handling of specimens. There are no charges for on-site study of the collections by an individual.

Access to collections data.  The information on herbarium specimen labels entered in the WBIS database system is available without charge on-site to anyone with a legitimate reason for consulting the specimens. The Herbarium staff has, and will continue, to honor request on an one-to-one basis from off-site professional investigators for electronic access to the specimen label data entered in WBIS.  Off-site requests for data on threatened and endangered species require approval by the staff of the Bureau of Endangered Resources of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, PO Box 7921, Madison, WI 53707, (608) 266-7012. 

At present, Herbarium users are required to pay fees only in cases where Herbarium staff are required to spend a significant amount of time providing identifications of specimens. We do not anticipate any user fees for access to the electronic data contained in the Wisflora and Wisconsin Botanical Inofrmation System databases.

Loan Policy

The sending and receiving of loans is one of the most important functions of the Herbarium. We have actively sought to have our specimens examined and correctly identified by taxonomic specialists, and using Herbarium News, recent publications, and personal contacts in the taxonomic community to solicit the borrowing of WIS material.

Loans are made to botanical institutions or departments engaged in taxonomic research and postgraduate instruction and in rare cases to qualified individuals not officially connected with an institution. The head of the borrowing institution assumes responsibility for the safe custody and return of the specimens. Except in rare cases, requests for loans are honored without reservation, both as to size and duration, but we request that specimens be returned at the earliest opportunity, and in the case of large loans, in which difficult taxa may require more time for study, we encourage partial returns. Loans must not be removed from the borrowing institution, and they may not be transferred from one institution to another without written permission and agreement of all parties concerned.

All loaned specimens should be annotated as fully as possible before being returned. Annotations should be made on a separate label approximately 2.5 x 10 cm.; they should be typewritten or written with indelible ink, never with a ballpoint or felt tip pen; and they should be glued fast to the herbarium sheet, preferably above the original label or near the bottom of the sheet. The annotation should bear the accepted name of the taxon, the name of the investigator, his/her institution, and the date of the identification. If the researcher agrees with the original determination or cannot make a determination, the specimen should be so annotated. Previous annotations should not be altered, and original labels or notes must not be marked, covered, or removed. All TYPE specimens should be annotated with the BASIONYM and citation of the place of publication.

Incomplete labels, especially on older specimens and mounted type photographs, can often be augmented with more complete data from duplicate sheets on loan from other institutions. We encourage researchers to provide any such additional data on a separate slip and attach it to appropriate WIS specimens. We would appreciate this especially when it involves adding the locality, date, collector, or collection number to the specimen.

All University of Wisconsin-Madison specimens should be cited with the accepted herbarium acronym "WIS" in any published specimen listings. The bar code number is also the WIS accession number and can be cited along with the acronym.

Destructive Sampling Policy

Judicious dissection of specimens is normally permitted. Whenever possible, all material studied should be returned to the herbarium specimens. The removal of important elements such as flowers, fruits, leaves, wood, or pollen for destructive procedures is not permitted without prior written permission from the Director or a member of the curatorial staff. Permission for removal of material is contingent upon adherence to the following guidelines.

• Leaf material, pollen, spores, etc., may be removed from specimens only when there is adequate material available. Care must be taken not to damage the specimen.
• Material may not be removed from type collections, or from taxa represented in the Herbarium by fewer than 3 collections, except in rare instances, and then only by a WIS staff member.
• Each specimen must be annotated, indicating the material removed, the nature of the study, the researcher’s name and institutional affiliation, and the date. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Herbarium should be cited in any resulting publications, copies of which should be sent to the Director of the Herbarium.
• Material may not be removed from a herbarium sheet for a second time if the nature of the study is the same (e.g., pollen material for SEM studies, leaf tissue for DNA analysis).
• Requests for removal of material for DNA studies will be reviewed and approved by the Director. An extraction protocol must be submitted, along with an estimate of the amount of material needed. Results, both positive and negative, are expected to be reported in writing to the Director. Specimens used for these studies should be annotated. GenBank database accession numbers should be included in the written report to the Director so that these numbers can be transferred to the annotation labels on the specimens by Herbarium staff.
• We would appreciate having duplicate glass slides of pollen grains and copies of photographic prints resulting from studies based on our specimens.

Acquisition Policy

Specimens are acquired as a result of field work by the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, staff, students, by exchanges, gifts, and purchases made through the University of Wisconsin Herbarium Fund or the Oscar N. & Ethel K. Allen Fund. We accept almost all materials received as exchanges, gifts, or project vouchers, and we encourage new contacts and the opening of new exchange accounts. We have exercised on occasion, however, the right to discard, return, or relay to more appropriate institutions material deemed unsuitable for WIS or of greater interest or utility elsewhere. Our acquisition policy reflects the research aims of the staff and the needs of the state, region, and nation.

The geographic priorities for the acquisition of vascular plants specimens for the Herbarium fall into these four categories:

Wisconsin: especially from poorly collected areas and taxonomically critical groups in need of further study. We are, of course, the largest repository of Wisconsin flora and have the responsibility to represent it in great detail.

Neotropics: especially temperate Mexico, the Andean region and Venezuela. We currently participate in several cooperative, international endeavors to this end. The WIS herbarium has made special efforts to acquire specimens from the Neotropics for several reasons: a) the need to collect in the tropics before they are destroyed; b) the interest of students in tropical systematics and evolution; c) the need to study the taxonomy, evolution, and ethobotany of cultivated plants: d) the general interest in Mexico as the biogeographic source area of much of the North American flora and our particular interest in the flora of southwestern Mexico.

Holarctic: especially from poorly represented and biogeographically significant areas. These include most of the former U.S.S.R. (especially Siberia and the Far East), Japan, and eastern China.

Other areas: Collections from places such as Hawaii, Africa, and Australia are welcome in small lots simply to provide representative samples of exotic plant families used as resources for the teaching of advance courses. Other worldwide materials are acquired if they represent families of research interest to faculty, staff, and students, or if they complement historical taxonomic strengths of the WIS Herbarium.

The former Director, H. H. Iltis, had always adhered to Edgar Anderson’s admonition to develop a so-called "inclusive herbarium," that is, insofar as possible, an intellectually stimulating collection with a maximum amount of biological, evolutionary, and cultural content, including drawings or photographs, graphs and measurements, and any other pertinent material that can readily be attached to an herbarium sheet.

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Last updated June 28, 2004