A museum and a university co-staff a research scientist.

Museums and their roles as cultural institutions have evolved rapidly in the last 50 years. A growing trend toward broadened mandates and other factors have created resource challenges that encourage new opportunities. Although this paper focuses on natural history museums, similar arguments for co-staffing could be formulated for other museums. For natural history museums, the resource challenge extends to a dwindling number of systematics experts who are essential in acquiring specimens for the collection, creating new knowledge about them through research, and in providing information that is valuable to the full range of other museum programs. This paper reviews existing models for maintaining scientific expertise at museums, and details a new model to acquire and maintain scientific expertise through a case study at one of Canada's national museums and a local university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]