TY - JOUR T1 - Italian natural history museums on the verge of collapse? JF - ZooKeys JO - ZK M3 - 10.3897/zookeys.456.8862 VL - 456 AU - Andreone, Franco AU - Bartolozzi, Luca AU - Boano, Giovanni AU - Boero, Ferdinando AU - Bologna, Marco Alberto AU - Bon, Mauro AU - Bressi, Nicola AU - Capula, Massimo AU - Casale, Achille AU - Casiraghi, Maurizio AU - Chiozzi, Giorgio AU - Delfino, Massimo AU - Doria, Giuliano AU - Durante, Antonio AU - Ferrari, Marco AU - Gippoliti, Spartaco AU - Lanzinger, Michele AU - Latella, Leonardo AU - Maio, Nicola AU - Marangoni, Carla AU - Mazzotti, Stefano AU - Minelli, Alessandro AU - Muscio, Giuseppe AU - Nicolosi, Paola AU - Pievani, Telmo AU - Razzetti, Edoardo AU - Sabella, Giorgio AU - Valle, Marco AU - Vomero, Vincenzo AU - Zilli, Alberto Y1 - 24/11/2014 UR - https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.456.8862 N2 - The Italian natural history museums are facing a critical situation, due to the progressive loss of scientific relevance, decreasing economic investments, and scarcity of personnel. This is extremely alarming, especially for ensuring the long-term preservation of the precious collections they host. Moreover, a commitment in fieldwork to increase scientific collections and concurrent taxonomic research are rarely considered priorities, while most of the activities are addressed to public events with political payoffs, such as exhibits, didactic meetings, expositions, and talks. This is possibly due to the absence of a national museum that would have better steered research activities and overall concepts for collection management. We here propose that Italian natural history museums collaborate to instate a “metamuseum”, by establishing a reciprocal interaction network aimed at sharing budgetary and technical resources, which would assure better coordination of common long-term goals and scientific activities. PB - Pensoft Publishers SP - 139-146 SN - 1313-2989 SN - 1313-2970 IS - ER -