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A secondary objective is to promote support of natural history museums as valuable providers of high quality information about increasingly threatened biodiversity, and to improve the ability of scientists, natural resource managers and the public to recognize, understand and conserve that biodiversity. We hope that this project motivates more researchers to deposit specimens in major museum collections. With the advent of online databases like this website, the simple act of donating specimens to a major Natural History Museum quickly and nearly effortlessly achieves for the donor a nearly cost-free but tangible and long-lived contribution to society by making the specimens and associated data permanently available to a broad audience.
