Flying fish: successful refurbishment at France's Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

US researchers visiting the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris are surprised to learn that they can leave transformers for their binocular microscopes and other electrical devices in their hotel rooms. The museum's electrical system is antiquated — like much of the rest of the museum — and still operates at 110 volts, whereas the rest of Europe switched to 240 volts decades ago.

The dire state of the vast museum is an extreme example of a problem facing many of the world's natural history museums. Their collections are deteriorating, and there is an urgent need for expensive and well organized storage and research conditions to keep specimens free from insects, dust and extremes of temperature and humidity.

An example of what renovation can achieve comes from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, which has transferred 20 million specimens from the museum's cramped quarters to a purpose-built 50,000-square-metre storage and research centre in Suitland, just south of the capital. This is a far cry from the Paris museum, where collections are often piled in boxes in corridors, and where a fire in 1995 came within metres of one of the world's richest herbariums, a tinderbox of 8 million specimens (see Nature 385, 378; 1997).

A recent report by France's interministerial committee for national public works warns that the museum will face a crisis unless the government launches a massive refurbishment programme. “If no new investments are made, tomorrow it will be the laboratories that face closure,” it says.

The Paris museum's collections are rivalled only by those of the Smithsonian Institution and London's Natural History Museum. They include 2 million fossils, 150 million insects, and 1.5 million vertebrates, including 1 million fish, 200,000 amphibians and reptiles, and 272,000 birds and mammals — not to mention a myriad of geological specimens including seven kilometres of ‘carrots’ from ocean drilling.

Henry de Lumley, the museum's director, says his “number one priority” is to renovate the collections, which currently receive just FF2 million (US$330,000) a year. The report will provide him with ammunition for his proposal to the state's major public works funds for a FF2 billion, 15-year renovation programme, similar to the FF500 million renovation of the museum's Great Hall of Evolution (see Nature 362, 280; 1993).

Refurbishment of collections is also a burning issue at the Natural History Museum in London, even though its finances are in much better shape than those of the Paris museum, following a decade of harsh austerity measures (see page 119). “We are really concerned about the state of our collections,” says Steve Blackmore, keeper of botany. “Establishing the need for that expenditure is something that we need to continue pressing our case for.”

The London museum is able to pay for a planned £300,000 (US$500,000) rehousing of its 6 million herbarium specimens from its own resources. But an urgently required 15-year renovation of its other collections housed in unsuitable Victorian buildings — estimated to cost £60-80 million — is well beyond the museum's means, and will require a special fundraising effort.