A grant has been awarded the Carnegie Institute to renovate museum storage space and refurbish cabinets and perform other upgrades to the arthropod collection of the institution. The collection contains more than 15 million specimens of insects and other arthropods of great historical and scientific value. The project will retrofit several hundred existing cabinets with new drawers to hold specimens. Pinned specimens will be transferred to the new housings. Data from a large collection of crustaceans and from a collection of slide specimens of fleas will be entered into a database to make the information more accessible to scientists and educators. Consulting experts will provide expertise in curation of several major insect groups. The project will renovate a historic space, the Holland Room, and make the new facility accessible to the public as a showcase for historical systematic research and how modern work is done. Three students per year will be recruited from the University of Pittsburgh for the project, during which time they will be trained in curation and database techniques.
