As part of the RCN, the U. S. National Science Foundation has funded two types of student internships. These internships will fund students who are working on best practices in natural history collections curation and interdisciplinary research using collections. The Society for Preservation of Natural History Collections will supervise the best practices interns and the RCN Steering Committee will supervise the research interns.

Research and Best Practices Interns for Summer 2010: Rebecca Jana will be working with Paul Tinerella at the Illinois Natural History Survey on "The ticks (Acari: Ixodoidea) of Illinois: An WWW resource for specimen occurence data, faunistics, and epidemiological associations" and Melissa Barton will be working with Elizabeth Leith and Marcia Revelez at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on developing an overview of best practices in natural history collections to aid the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections in planning for research into best practices.