The Unique Role of Federal Scientific Collections: Infrastructure Generating Benefits, Serving Diverse Agency Missions

Research and development (R and D) in science and technology are critical activities for the missions of many of the Federal governments departments and agencies. Scientific investigations that lead to discoveries and progress commonly rest on the analysis of physical objects, ranging from rock cores drilled and extracted from Earths crust, to plants, animals, microbes, and fossils from diverse environments and through history, to extraterrestrial samples from the moon and beyond, among many others. They have been collected by Federal agencies since shortly after the nations founding, and many of them have been retained and preserved since then as government property. Long-term preservation ensures that future generations will have access to them, to verify previous analyses and to conduct new analyses that extract new types of information from them. This document presents 21 vignettes that illustrate the value generated by the objects in these collections. These objects continue to have value decades or centuries after the research for which they were collected was completed (e.g., Vignettes 4 and 11). When a need for analysis of specific objects arises, the cost of not having access to them can be devastating.