GEORGIA COLLEGE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, SURVIVING IN A LOW BUDGET ENVIRONMENT

Georgia College is the state's designated Public Liberal Arts University with a focus on undergraduate education. We have approximately 300 teaching faculty and 6,000 on-campus undergraduate students. The Museum of Natural History is located within the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and has its roots in a collection of White River Badlands fossils amassed by a former faculty member over a thirty year career. New faculty hires have resulted in dramatic increases in research collections in fields such as ornithology, herpetology, entomology and phycology. Being a teaching institution, the department lacked sufficient funds for many years to maintain a dedicated museum staff for the research collections. Due in part to changing priorities and small endowments, we now have a permanent staff position dedicated to the collections and a small display museum open to the public. We also have many hurdles to overcome. We are still constrained by budget, we have a large backlog of specimens in need of curation, we need to update electronic databases and embrace advances in technology, we are dealing with the loss or misplacement of information, and we have a lack of space for the growing collections. In addition, we have a relatively new expectation to provide in-house and traveling public outreach.