Good news, and bad news...

First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters.

Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of type specimens. Why this matters is that the very name of species depend on there being type specimens. Go read Catalogue of Organisms, an amazing blog in any case, on the matter.

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It's always shocking to observe of closing of any kind archives (google groups <-//-> t.o, or real specimens..).

former t.o'ist
MrKAT from Finland

I don't know what's behind the economic problems of the herbarium, but I'd be curious to know if it has something to do with the recent drive for privatizing and "effectivizing". In other European countries, this has resulted in absurd situations when university buildings are given for free to new state-owned companies to manage, and they then charge market-based rent for the offices and labs, although in most cases the university has no real choice of location.