Journal international de l'évolution

Survival for All: Let?s Share Benefits and Hardships

Makoto K. Shimada

Survival for All: Let’s Share Benefits and Hardships

Libraries have played a central role in the inheritance of human knowledge. Thus, publicity and systematic management are keys in accomplishing the library’s mission. In natural science, natural history museums have been functioning as a public domain of knowledge inheritance. Because of this, morphologists and taxonomists have been conducting research by using specimens in museums. Recently, biological databases have provided public access to various types of research sources, such as research papers, sequences of nucleic and amino acids, and medical samples. Although such new public resources for life science have great potential, they have unstable financial bases.