Over the many years that I have worked on this project, I have received the help of numerous friends and colleagues from around the world. I do not have the space to acknowledge everyone by name, but I would like to mention those individuals who have contributed critical or extremely obscure citations, cultural references, and invaluable advice, including Andrew Bentley, Brent Brock, Bob Child, Anna Dhody, Dante Fenolio, Linda S. Ford, Catharine A. Hawks, Marinus Hoogmoed, Susan Jewett, Liesl Jonker, Todd Kelly, Brad Kemp, Edward Kowalski, James B. Ladonski, William Lamar, Tor Limbo, Sandra C. Lindstrom, Sofia Galarza Liu, William López-Rosas, Elizabeth Merritt, Peter Mudde, Yaneth Muñoz-Saba, Giovanni Onore, Lars Österdahl, Timothy Paine, Jane Pickering, Ann Pinzl, Jeff Plant, Cindy Ramotnik, Roberto Rodriguez, Stephen P. Rogers, Steffan Roth, Sally Y. Shelton, Ron Skylstad, Julianne Snider, Sylvia Suarez, and Arnold Suzumoto.
I thank Sandra Jaime Silva for inviting me to supervise her outstanding redesign and renovation of the Colección de Anatomía at Universidad El Bosque in Bogotá, Colombia, and for sharing what she learned during the project as she applied many of the principles and practices recommended in this volume.
I am extremely grateful to several people for many in-depth discussions on fluid preservation, including Andrew Bentley, Julian Carter, Oliver Crimmen, Catharine A. Hawks (who taught me how to ask the fundamental questions, and why they should be asked), Simon Moore, Robert W. Waller (who taught me to how to think about fluid preservation from a chemical perspective), and Andries van Dam. I thank Tracy Hicks for introducing me to fluid preservation from a completely different perspective—as art—and inviting me to collaborate with him on several fascinating projects involving creative uses of fluid-preserved objects.
I thank Chris Collins for inviting me to participate in the Cloth Makers Foundation Expert Workshop on Benchmark Standards for the Preservation of Wet Collections at the Natural History Museum in London, and my fellow panelists for their lively discussions and questions—Andrew Bentley, Julian Carter, Chris Collins, Oliver Crimmen, Simon Moore, Birger Neuhaus, Dirk Neumann, and Andries van Dam.
Joachim Händel generously sent me a copy of his comprehensive book, Makro-sckopische Präparations-technik: Wirbellose. Leitfaden für das Sammeln, Präparieren und Konservieren (Piechocki and Händel 2007). Ann Pinzl kindly shared her extensive unpublished research on botanical fluid preservation. Dirk Neumann was particularly helpful in providing information, comments, and references, and in reviewing earlier drafts of portions of the text.
Kristian Murphy Gregersen deserves a very special acknowledgment and much gratitude for sharing his extensive unpublished research and in-depth knowledge on the history of formaldehyde.
Simon J. Moore has been extraordinarily generous in sharing not only his vast knowledge of fluid preservation, but for allowing me to participate in his most excellent and highly recommended fluid preservation course at the Horniman Museum in London, in which I had the opportunity to put into practice many techniques and procedures I had only read about.
I thank my editor at Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Charles Harmon, for taking a chance on this book and for his much appreciated diligence throughout the writing and production process. I cannot imagine getting this project to completion without his help.
Julianne Snider helped select and prepare images for this book and made numerous suggestions to improve the content and formatting. More significantly, this project would never have been completed without her advice, encouragement, and unending support.
A project of this complexity (involving the review of more than one thousand references) could not have been accomplished without access to excellent library resources and assistance from dedicated professional librarians. The reference librarian who first taught me how to find information in the scientific literature was Ruth Fauhl, a beloved librarian at the University of Kansas when I was an undergraduate. While doing the early research for this project, I was fortunate to have the friendly and able assistance of two other knowledgeable and extremely helpful librarians at the University of Kansas, Chanette Kirby and Bayless Harsh. I started this project well before the days of electronic access to published materials, much less the easy access provided now through the Internet (even today, however, much of the literature is still not available electronically). We must not lose sight of the fact that the electronic resources we now access so easily are available only because professional librarians organize vast amounts of information and make it accessible—and keep the system functioning and expanding. Therefore, this book is dedicated to the fine professional librarians at the University of Kansas and in libraries everywhere, who are an underappreciated but absolutely irreplaceable resource, fundamental to successful scholarship.