Right now, I'm standing in the middle of our mineral reference
collection.
And this is one of three collections
that we have here in our larger department of mineral sciences.
In addition to the mineral collection, which the gem
collection is part of, we also have our meteorite collection.
And we have a rock and ore collection.
And being a natural history museum,
our department is the part of the museum
that deals with the hard, non-living part of the Earth--
the rocks, the minerals, anything
that's not a plant or an animal pretty much ends up
in our department.
But the broader museum has science departments
in all these other areas of research.
So we have seems like endless numbers of biology departments.
We have paleobiology, anthropology,
all these other areas of research going on.
And we're kind of this small, little oasis of mineral
sciences here in this large sea of biology.
But on the other hand, since the Earth is mostly
made up of rock, we understand the importance of our role
here.
So this is the mineral reference collection.
We have in this room, which you can
see extends for quite a ways, about 375,000 mineral specimens
from around the world.
And the purpose of this collection
primarily is to support scientific research.
And so if we open a couple drawers here just
to give you an idea of what is in this room,
so each of these drawers is filled with mineral specimens
from around the world.
Minerals are arranged according to the Dana system, which
is a system based on composition.
So all of the similar kinds of minerals
are going to be together in one place.
So for scientists coming in, they
can find most the things they're interested in all
in one part of the collection.
So for example, this is quartz.
And within the quartz drawers, we
have them arranged alphabetically by locality.
So we have everything from Arkansas to Brazil to Japan.
Here I'm in the Ms, so I've got some from Madagascar and Maine.
And so these are specimens that are used, again,
primarily by research scientists.
Now each of the specimens gets a number on it.
So for example, we've got a number here.
That is keyed to a computerized database.
We can then go and look up all the information
we have about that specimen.
It also allows us to keep track of where it is.
But if a researcher comes in and is
interested in studying this specimen,
then we typically take just a little chip off of this.
We call it a chip to be consumed.
And we send that with the researcher.
What we ask in return is that they share with us
any data that they've acquired or papers
they publish so we can add that back to our database
and make it more valuable and more
useful for other scientists.
Essentially any scientist in the world
has access to this collection.
Typically nowadays, most of them will contact me by email
with a brief description of their research project.
And as long as they're connected to a legitimate research
organization, we'll try to find specimens
in the collection that will fit for their particular research
needs.
Ultimately, the value of this collection,
really, is to the overwhelming scientific community
of the world because this is a collection that
is one of the largest of its kind in the world
and we truly believe will essentially be here forever.
And also being the Smithsonian, being our national collection,
it's always going to be accessible to researchers.
And that means a specimen like this being studied today
will still be around here tens of years, hundreds of years,
maybe thousands of years from now.
So scientists can always come back,
re-study the same specimen, look at it.
So it becomes the standard mineral collection
for the scientific community.
And so it's this long-term accessibility
to the scientific community that really makes this collection as
valuable as it is.