| Abstract | As budgets shrink and the focus of academic institutions shift, small collections are often the casualty. Faced with declining staff and lack of institutional support to replace curators or preserve the space required to house natural history collections, these collections become a perceived liability to host institutions. In the worst cases, they are allowed to degrade or even be discarded. In other cases, larger institutions, usually regional museums, are asked to assume responsibility for these collections, which usually means transferring them to the receiving institution. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has been involved in resurrecting or transferring several orphaned collections. This presentation recounts the scope of this problem and the steps and resources required to save these endangered collections.
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