An undergraduate student (Aime Rankin) doing a project with me on citation and impact of museum collections came across a paper I hadn't seen before: Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall, but here's the abstract (you can also get a PDF here): It's well worth a read. It argues that sequence databases such as Genbank are essentially the equivalent of the great natural history museums of the 19th Century. There are several ironies here.

Ideas on measuring the "impact" of a natural history collection have been bubbling along, as reflected in recent comments on iPhylo, and some offline discussions I've been having with David Blackburn and Alan Resetar.