1The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol apply both to genetic resources and the associated traditional knowledge conserved ex situ, i.e., when conserved outside their natural habitats or even their country of origin. Ex situ collections refer to physical resources and associated traditional knowledge embodied in material goods such as herbaria, stuffed animals or ethnographic objects preserved and accessible in the collections historically assembled in the West. Ex situ collections are a historical and tangible reality in terms of the number of objects they contain. However, they are not addressed by the text of the CBD or of the Protocol, even though they are one of the sticking points among the parties, in particular due to the conditions of their assembly in what was essentially a colonial context.

2There is no legal definition of the notion of a collection. European Regulation no. 511/2014 implementing the Nagoya Protocol established some guidance for collections. This guidance proposes due diligence mechanisms1 for the collections in light of their historical presence, their numerical magnitude, their vital importance to research, and the actors involved in the knowledge acquisition chain. Classed as ex situ collections, museum and scientific collections remain a key underlying issue in the negotiations, involving in particular the notion of cross-border resources (Article 10 of the Nagoya Protocol – see Chap. 15). They are a cornerstone of benefit sharing.

3This chapter will discuss the origin and development of natural history collections and their intrinsic and constitutive links with the birth of the museum, primarily in Europe, using representative examples from France. Why should anyone have assembled these collections, why continue to add to them, why maintain them and ensure their conservation and preservation? There is no obvious answer, and justifications and motivations have diverged with the changing times. Many authors have taken an interest in these collections, and one of the keys to understanding them is doubtless to be found in the history of Western European thought. This is certainly one of the great paradoxes of these collections, which gather both material objects and objects of the mind and science. The concept and uses of these collections have become formalised, multiplied, and even renewed as scientific research and technological advancement has progressed. Collections of physical objects are thus now seen as constituting a kind of thesaurus, and, with the advancement of new technologies, as sources of new knowledge about life.

Why assemble ex situ collections?

4The pivotal period of the 14^th–15^th centuries constitutes one of the most crucial stages in the assembly of natural history collections, and one that strongly influences our current practice. Nature was gradually ceasing to be considered part of divine Revelation, and plants and more particularly animals were no longer seen only through the symbolic prism conferred upon them by mentions or quotations in sacred and gnostic books. Bestiaries gave way to the treatises, and a new class of person appeared in society in addition to such men of knowledge as apothecaries, scholars, theologians and the like. When the “savant” first appeared, this personage took two distinct types, which would ultimately continue to exist side-by-side: the “curious” type, and another type who could not exactly be called a researcher quite yet but was beginning to investigate causality in beings, beyond mere aesthetics and the knowledge of Antiquity (Bondaz et al., 2016; Pomian, 1987). This new personage set out to describe the world according to a compilation method that borrowed greatly from those who had gone before but would gradually begin to incorporate more and more observations, first second-hand, then direct: written elements (not yet known as “data”) would become verifiable, and then reliable. Moreover, the savants began to describe things that they were no longer content to simply proclaim or compile. And thanks to objects preserved in collections, they could prove their assertions. Collections thus bear material witness to the history of ideas and the history of a discipline, and are thereby guardians of our knowledge. We can make reference to these objects as they have been preserved and documented; we can confirm them, specify them, with no time limit other than their material persistence. The objects thus collected and preserved, assembled at a single location, also serve the other pillar of our knowledge: comparison. We compare in order to prove, then to explain, and, finally, to teach. The thematic collection of objects first took shape in the 16^th century, in cabinets of curiosities. Over time, these cabinets gradually evolved into the institutional or private collections of the 19^th century, which were seen as a tool for describing the world, then into those of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, seen as a resource for explaining the world.

The world in a display case

5Cabinets and collections from the 16^th to the 18^th centuries gleaned among objects from Antiquity, novelties collected from the exploration of the world, feats of artistic craftsmanship and natural oddities (including some fake ones too, even then…). Every amateur and collector knows that what one person calls by one name may be the same as what someone else calls by another (see for example Belon du Mans, 1997). These cabinets were notoriously disparate and disorganised, to say the least (Mauriès, 2002; Moncond’huy, 2013). Anyway, what criteria should have been used to order them? Collectors used criteria all their own, based on their own conceptions of the world. The lack of organisation or specialisation in these collections lasted a long while, at least in France. Buffon himself chose not to adopt a definitive classification system (Daugeron 2009), unlike some of his compatriots, such as Bonnier de la Mosson.

6In order for there to be a commonly - if not universally - accepted classification, there must first be a common language; yet, while Linnaeus would provide this language in 1759, it would not be adopted by Buffon’s successors until some 40 years later. Nevertheless, starting in the early 19^th century, the movement had begun. Nomenclature and systematics guide the organisation of collections in all European countries. Plants and animals, living or fossilised, and mineral samples would be described and arranged with increasing precision throughout the century, according to identification criteria that would remain more or less unchanged until after the Second World War. Systematics and nomenclature thus came to constitute the new language for communication among savants and the sharing of knowledge.

Birth of the museum

7The birth of the museum as we know it today, namely a public institution dedicated to the production of knowledge based on the study of collections specially assembled according to a defined theme, has been described with great precision by Deloche & Léniaud (1989) and by Lacour (2014). It took place in much the same way across all of Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

8In France, the starting point was the French Revolution, when the collections of the nobles and the bourgeoisie were confiscated and maintained, and thus saved from destruction so that they could be used for the education of all. In 1793, the Musée central des arts (the Central Museum of the Arts, later known as the Louvre), the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History/MNHN), and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (Conservatory of Arts and Trades) were the first to be created. The network of provincial museums was then established in addition to these original institutions (Poulot, 2005). The idea was to be able to broadly disseminate knowledge through institutions serving as relays for their counterparts in Paris.

9At the start of the 19^th century, the Muséum de Paris was undoubtedly the most renowned establishment in Europe, both in terms of intellectual influence and in terms of its collections. Before the Revolution, there were 1,760 mammals and birds listed in the King’s Cabinet. In 1822, inventories show more than 40,000 specimens, primarily the result of confiscations, but also the result of primary collections and primary donations (Schnitter, 1996).

10Buffon endeavoured to describe nature and as many as possible of the species inhabiting it, but he was still trying to do so based on very few specimens, or even just one. This single-specimen thinking would remain the preferred approach for a long while. Surplus specimens, considered “doubles,” would be provided to schools and museums in the region, or exchanged with foreign museums, a trend that would last at least until the First World War. This particularity of French collections can be seen as an extension of the encyclopaedism so dear to the Age of Enlightenment and shared by Buffon: comprehensiveness was paramount, not the variation within each category.

11Once the knowledge associated with natural history collections had a language of its own, it was able to spread throughout France for nearly a century, during both the prosperous and not-so-prosperous periods of the Paris-based driving force and its regional extensions. The collections, spreading over the whole of the national territory, thus came into their own as material guarantors of knowledge, and as evidence of new knowledge generated by research.

Spreading knowledge

12But the ability to achieve the acquisition of knowledge throughout the national territory was only one part of the puzzle, because it was still necessary to develop knowledge before teaching it. The creation of central schools and regional museums was the pillar of this dissemination of knowledge - knowledge that was especially nourished, at least during the first half of the 19^th century, by what was undeniably the “Golden Age” of the Muséum National (Laissus, 1995). Forty years of prosperity and influence established it as an essential institution in Europe, and so it remained for a long while. The Museum’s professors were active in teaching and writing, and their writings greatly contributed to the dissemination of scientific knowledge throughout society.

13This period saw the emergence of the savant as a character in society. The establishment of museums in city centres as places of universal knowledge de facto made the curator into a kind of local governor, guardian of the collections as well as the intellectual and material issues they represent. The savant thus became essential to the well-being of the nation, and helped it to achieve progress by means of his work and research. But at the same time as educating the greatest possible number of people became a central concern, a corollary question emerged of “how”; how could the language of research, which develops continuously and inevitably undergoes unforeseen changes, be translated into a language of science, which seeks to expose and confirm facts with certainty? The risk of a disconnection between the two languages, and of information loss by elision and over-simplification, was nothing new. The presentation in museums of the specimens upon which the language of science was based was also a way of reducing this risk, since one could always go back to observing them directly.

14Collections therefore emerged as a mandatory point of passage for access to knowledge, since the return to observation makes it possible to engage in an act of critique relative to what one has been taught or has read. Observation can temper the risk of discrepancies or fractures between the different languages. And, of course, it also predisposes the observer to engage in further research.

Interactions and pathways central to practices and discoveries 

15Collection methods became more specialised at the same time as the collections’ object was made more precise. Though collection had been a rather simple matter in the case of botany, a dominant discipline from the 14^th to the 18^th centuries, when it came to systematising harvests for a given taxon, it became more complicated. Thus, in zoology, by the end of the 18^th century, collection came to be conducted in a more targeted manner. Technical progress made in the 19^th century (firearms for example) helped optimise campaigns in the field.

Naturalist travellers

16The first major innovation in matters of collection coincided with the rise of the “naturalist travellers.” This started with an approach that brought together naturalists whose enthusiasm for their subject, combined with their circumstances, led them to travel long distances over long periods of time. The traveling naturalist worked in the company of relatively extensive communities of people: porters, cooks, game hunting beaters, wild food hunters and others in the great expeditions of the period 1890-1920, benefiting from the local people’s knowledge of nature. The personage of the traveling naturalist could not have appeared without the parallel development of technical means and channels of communication suitable for publicising these novelties.

17Beyond discussions of the collection of specimens, however, the words of Alphonse Milne-Edwards, director of the Museum, delivered at the inauguration of the educational programme provided to naturalist travellers in 1894, do provide some food for thought: “We must now make the most of these new possessions [the colonies] and to do so we must know what they produce, by what race of men they are inhabited, what kinds of fauna and flora they have, what types of metals their soil contains, etc. […]. Only under such conditions can we begin to exploit them fruitfully.” (Filhol, 1894). The stage was thus set that would lead to the human zoo at the colonial exhibition of 1931 in Paris. The explorer of the wild world arrogated a comprehensive body of rights to himself, from the right to survey indigenous resources to the right to exhibit them to the nation. These collections, which exhibit a variety of flora and fauna not quite yet constituting actual biodiversity, then became an emblem of pride for European nations.

Museums and exhibitions, tools of colonialism

18This parallel development of technical knowledge and naturalistic knowledge continued throughout the 19^th century: the biggest of today’s museums first rose to prominence during the last quarter of the century.

19Moreover, the notion of “natural history” itself was evolving. The term is included on the pediments of buildings with an architecture more reminiscent of ancient religious buildings than anything else: the museum as temple, a holy place of Science, or rather, of the Natural Sciences. Beyond semantics and names, the “science” museum was obliged to evolve, driven by advances in thinking as much as by the growth of the collections themselves and their intellectual and material organisation. The changing methods used for the physical storage of collections – from miscellaneous stacks to specially designed furniture, then to a spatial separation between exhibition spaces and storage spaces (called reserves) – reflect the different conceptions of science in different eras. The rise of taxonomy is the perfect example of the interactions between physical and intellectual approaches to arrangement.

20The galleries of the naturalist museums of industrial Europe in the 19^th gave the observer an impression that they were incessantly assembling their collections, as if nature were inexhaustible, and existed only at the service of Western civilisation. Man (European man) dominated the rest of the world, thanks to his knowledge and technology, and exploited the resources for his exclusive profit. That “looting” has been clearly pointed out in the case of collections of living mammals (Baratay & Hardouin-Fugier, 1998), but such observations can easily be adapted to apply as well to collections of non-living mammals and birds, two taxa particularly popular in Western Europe.

21The dissemination of knowledge took another turn with the rise of the world’s fairs. These were massive public events, exhibiting innovations or the state of the art in certain disciplines, while the same time showcasing the prestige of the organising or participating nations. The movement expressed a desire for power, especially colonial power, and began in earnest starting in 1851, the date of the first world’s fair in London. Natural history could hardly be excluded from this tendency to innovate, and took its rightful place within it. World’s fairs also helped to promote the spread of a certain way of presenting nature in Europe, in particular by means of “dioramas.” These more or less ambitious installations, first designed to present one or more animals in their biotope, also illustrated the Western notion of dominion over nature, as if 19^th century man could “recreate” it (Wonders, 1993; Dohm et al., 2017). One might also wonder whether these enormous collections might reflect a kind of uncertainty among scientists, who perhaps had the sense that the more these collections could accumulate on their lab tables and under their measuring instruments, the more disproportionate would appear the magnitude of what remained for them to discover, describe, understand, and archive!

Collections in the wake of the scientific revolutions

From collection to exploitation 

22After the First World War, the colonial naturalist traveller gave way to the research-explorer,2 foreshadowing the rise of another model character, one who was also a coloniser, but only in an intellectual sense. Since World War II, this has become a universal model, since the academic dethroned the naturalist explorer, and the runaway specialisation of laboratories replaced the expansive knowledge of scholars. The evolution of this model has today trended towards the rise of the multi-tasking researcher. Field collections are becoming increasingly technical, and concentrated in specialised programmes intended to meet the new scientific requirements of the genome and the challenges it presents, while in recent years scientific collections have begun to follow an economic control approach. The cost of a field mission is measured above all in its corollaries: publications, patents, and industrial partnerships. Collections have moved away from the splendours of the gallery and have been trending instead toward reserves. In less than thirty years, the growth of reserves,3 with complex, sometimes even off-putting access procedures, has become a major issue for museums and major collections around the world. Reserve collections at the MNHN include some 68 million specimens, representing several different stages in the acquisition of knowledge, and testifying to the various advancements made in understanding the world. These specimens all need to be arranged, labelled, and protected from degradation – gradual or rapid – but must also be kept constantly available to the public and research teams.

23From collection to use, museum and university naturalist collections constantly need to be supplemented and enriched, and their managers must continually justify the reasons for their maintenance and conservation. Collections are often accused of costing more than they earn.

24In the second half of the 20^th century, two major discoveries were made that changed and still continue to disrupt the use and interest of collections, and, by extension, to renew scientific knowledge, illustrating in an exemplary way the potential of the objects preserved in collections. Applied to museum objects, these two discoveries can be seen as types of “utilisation”4 within the meaning of the Nagoya Protocol, and thus as modifying the status of the objects and the terms of benefit-sharing.

C¹⁴ dating 

25The development of radiocarbon dating (also known as C¹⁴) in 1950 and its application to archaeological and organic objects still remains a benchmark for collection managers, correlating the preservation and the research potential of samples. By using this method, shards of pottery, human or wildlife bones, fragments of coals, oceanographic sediments can be dated and situated within an environmental and cultural chronology. The reliability of museum material has been an important parameter in testing and applying this dating method.

26One of the values of the collections resides in their synchronism and diachronism, which makes it possible to retrace history and go back in time in light of discoveries and technological advances. The notion of potentiality thus assumes its fullest meaning in regard to these objects, with properties that are currently known, but may also be linked to knowledge and discoveries still unknown. This shows the impact of the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol in terms of the resources to be admitted into museum collections and made accessible to scientific communities based on specific research questions. The knowledge support potential of resources admitted into collections can thus be tested or detected. How should this potential be taken into account when negotiating with providers?

The DNA revolution 

27The second discovery now renewing the interest of natural history museum collections is the DNA revolution (Puillandre, 2012). In the mid-1980s, molecular biology techniques allowing the extraction and isolation of DNA molecules were tested on old objects kept in museum collections. Early zoological tests in particular attempted to link living and extinct species, representatives of some of which are preserved in museums. The molecular potentiality, which may now be isotopic or proteomic, has led to cutting-edge research involving the use of natural history specimens, ad libitum renewing their interest and spurring their utilisation as research supports. The findings generated by developments in molecular biology are constantly disrupting taxonomic classifications and visions of the living world; the DNA revolution has confirmed and renewed this connection.

Collections: a source of renewed knowledge

28The information and data contained in collections have been preserved by the methods of preparation and conservation used for the objects, but the potential for new discoveries and the production of knowledge depend on technological developments. We have seen this happen in the two examples cited above; how could a curator who decided in 1890 to put some broken shards and reddish chunks of coal into crates possibly have imagined the future potential for dating these partial, incomplete, dirty objects that he had nevertheless recorded and preserved for the scientific interest associated with their conditions of collection? The interest of museum collections is thus confirmed. Its values are renewed with the advancement of technological and methodological progress, and the development of research questions that call for these objects to be re-examined, whether directly or indirectly. Today, ex situ collections serve as supports for data and new discoveries linked to the notion of “utilisation” as defined by the Nagoya Protocol, which has become predominant in contemporary scientific research due to the development of the group of sciences known as “omics” (Genomics, proteomics, etc.). What will be the technology of tomorrow that will reveal data unknown today but perhaps contained in these collections? Paradoxically, it is in this context that natural objects in collections reveal their data potentiality: by their age, their diachronic dimensions, and their irreplaceable function as witnesses to biotopes that are now degraded or have disappeared.

29Physical objects taken, offered or admitted into collections for their aesthetic qualities or the curiosity they arouse, the objects of natural history museum collections have become resources, due to the increasing rarity of their presence in nature, and concerns about protection of the environment and biodiversity, which increase the uniqueness and value of such samples. “Utilisation”, within the meaning of the Convention on Biological Diversity, via the omic disciplines as applied to ex situ natural resources increases their interest and their value. They constitute records of the soils and environments that underwent the industrial revolution. They also constitute the traces of periods of accelerated destruction of anthropogenic habitats, global warming and acidification of the oceans, etc. Historically-assembled collections are a thesaurus, and have a renewed interest as a source of information and data due precisely to their age and their historical nature (Lister, 2011).

Conclusion

30One of the issues that ex situ collections of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge must face concerns the conditions of their original accumulation, which in light of the Nagoya Protocol could retrospectively be qualified as biopiracy. Ownership of these resources and the retroactive application of modern regulations are now recurring latent issues in agreements and negotiations.

31Curators emphasise that ex situ collections in themselves constitute a form of benefit sharing. They have been working to ensure that this sharing is as extensive as possible via the development of digital technology. Resources preserved outside their natural environment, safeguarded from the destruction or degradation of their biotope, are thus potentially accessible via physical corpora and databases. Though physical resources are highly regulated today, the content and associated data they contain are essentially dematerialised, even intangible; they are now digitalised (Lannom, 2020), and can therefore be easily mobilised, transferred or searched (see Chap. 16). The proliferation of programmes for digitising collections via high definition images of types of African plants conserved ex situ, initiated by the Mellon Foundation-sponsored African Plants Initiative project, is a convincing example (https://www.tela-botanica.org/2013/11/article5957/; Le Bras, 2017).

32Geographic and financial barriers have long made consulting ex situ collections complex and costly for researchers and communities located outside Europe or the northern hemisphere. Nevertheless, acquisitions made by shipments, exchanges or collections in the field, as well as loans, have always been the core both of the practice of naturalist researchers and of the management procedures of ex situ natural history collections. Such movements help build these collections. For several years, alternatives to the physical shipping of samples have multiplied in response to new research orders that prioritise data, as well as in light of the various regulations that may apply, such as the Nagoya Protocol. The lengthening and expansion of loans thanks to digitised collections catalogues, or measures to facilitate the sampling of material from objects (as a variation of utilisations provided under the CBD for museum objects), have helped accommodate the physical inaccessibility and regulatory constraints associated with the movement of collections. The DiSSCo research infrastructure will thus eventually offer virtual access to all the natural history collections in Europe, and to on-demand loans or samples from that corpus, which comprises more than one billion specimens (Koureas & Rubio, 2019).

33The challenge these ex situ collections now face is how to couple the data on these physical objects and the intangible data now known or yet to be discovered with their availability to the broadest possible public, thus addressing the benefits listed in the Nagoya Protocol, in particular by means of providing access to ex situ genetic resource conservation facilities and databases.

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