As a former small museum curator I have certainly some biases, but these were developed over many years and are based on fairly solid experiences and data. In addition, over my career as a taxonomist (describing new species and relating these to known species) I have had a relationship with most of the natural history museums in the United States and a few in other countries (France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) because I often had to borrow specimens for study. Natural history museums are important just for that (professional cooperation), but they have many other functions, including the obvious - education — but also research, and public service. As a curator I was heavily involved with all these functions. Still natural history museums are usually underfunded and often attacked, especially in regard to politicized issues like global warming or evolution. Other museums — cultural, archeological, historical and for various art forms — are themselves often attacked on several grounds, only rarely valid. Mostly these are disagreements over taste or occasionally actual fraud regarding provenance. In recent years new laws regarding endangered species have forced natural history museum curators to develop more stringent requirements for documenting specimens and obtaining the now necessary permits for collecting, especially in foreign countries. Certainly this is a needed requirement because not all biologists or amateur biologists are scrupulous about such things. Still, the implementation of these laws occasionally leads into bureaucratic tangles and I have occasionally found myself unable to solve a few. Humans are quite capable of screwing up the most well intentioned and necessary regulations. On the whole I have found most enforcement agencies willing to help a curator comply with the laws and several have solicited aid in inventorying the biota under their jurisdiction. I thus had very good relations with all the National Forest, Bureau of Land Management and National Wildlife Service authorities and most other entities.
So, what are museums good for? As I mentioned earlier we provide a lot of services — teaching, research, cooperation with other scientists, public service and outreach. As I was at a university, obviously teaching higher education classes was an important function. I taught classes in the systematics and identification of several arthropod groups and other professors drew from our materials (we had a separate teaching collection). Research included taxonomy and systematics of course, but we also maintained voucher specimens for ecological and agricultural studies. Our cooperation with other scientists including identification services and loans of materials for study. Public service involved identification of possible pest or venomous arthropods for anybody who asked us. Finally the outreach to K-12 and various groups (first responders, natural history organizations, scouting organizations, etc.) involved direct contact with a thousand or more people a year, with indirect contact (exhibits for fairs, other museums and organizations) often involving over 10,000 people in a year. And we were a small specialized university museum! Large museums, like the American Museum of Natural History, draw at least ten times as many contacts and provide exhibits covering a massive chunk of the known biota, living and fossil, as well as minerals and archeological materials. Many are a vital resource for ongoing ecological and systematic research, including DNA and forensic research, and many are important for the identification of agricultural pests and biological control agents. Some collections, like Instituto Butantan, in Brazil, which had a huge number of venomous animals associated with their venoms research program, have been lost (in this case by a massive fire). Others have been threatened with loss of funding or even of being completely closed. Such losses are pretty much irreplaceable.
In essence, natural history collections are a vital storehouse of the accumulated knowledge of the earth’s biota, some of which (like specimens of the ivory-billed woodpecker) can never be recollected. It would be folly to lose them, but many are under threat. As a former curator I ask you to please support your local natural history museum by commenting about your experience when you visit, opposing fund cutting measures, and if you can, by giving financial support. This is important for all the reasons I have mentioned.