A survey on living collections

1What types of organisms are housed in your collection?

2Is your collection primarily Wild type, Genetically modified, or Other?

3How many specimens are included in your collection?

4How do you accession materials into your collection?

5Does your collection include organisms not available from any other source?

6What is the geographical source of the materials in your collection?

7When was your collection established?

8How many people work at your collection?

9Who uses your collection, and how do they use it?

10How do you communicate and/or interact with your users?

11How do people request materials from your collection?

12How do you share your collections with others?

13What is the most difficult thing about transporting living stocks?

14Do you have a formal Material Transfer Agreement?

15If you use an MTA, does it allow re-distribution?

16What percentage of your funding is used for the following?

  1. Salaries
  2. Maintenance
  3. Outreach
  4. Innovation
  5. Fundraising
  6. Other

17Please select the most appropriate answer below to describe your collection’s current financial situation

  1. We have fully secured funding for the next 5-10 years.
  2. We have fully secured funding for the next 3-5 years.
  3. We have fully secured funding for the next 1-3 years.
  4. We do not have funding secured for the next year.
  5. We have no current funding.

18What strategies are you using to help meet your collection’s immediate and long-term sustainability challenges?

  1. Developing and increasing new revenue streams
  2. Controlling costs
  3. Building good stakeholder relations and communications
  4. Creating contingency and disaster recovery plans
  5. Creating continuity and retaining staff
  6. Other

19Please use this space to provide additional information

20Do you charge users to access your collection?

21Please describe how you established your fee level.

22How long have you been charging your users?

23How has charging fees affected your financial sustainability?

24Why have you decided not to charge users to access your collection?

25What external factors (such as trends/changes in technology or society) have had the biggest impact on your collection’s financial sustainability?

26What metrics do you monitor to demonstrate the impact of your collection?

  1. Number of users
  2. Number of publications
  3. Number of citations
  4. Anecdotal testimonies from users
  5. Other

27How do you use the information you collect to demonstrate the impact and value of your collection?

28How do you advocate for your collection and the living collection community in general?

29If you left your collection today, would it continue to exist?

30Please describe the factors that will ensure your collection’s future existence.

31If applicable, please describe how you have established a succession plan, and any challenges you may have encountered in the process.

32How do you plan to change this to ensure your collection’s future existence?

33What challenges do you face when trying to plan for your collection’s future?

34What sustainability challenges are the most critical for the living collections community to address?

35Do you interact with other living collection managers?

36How often do you interact with other managers?

37How do you interact with them?

38What purpose does the interaction serve?