9420877 Tulane The Tulane University Fish Collection - a "National Center" Category collection with over 6 million fluid-preserved specimens in more than 168,000 lots, is the largest collection of post-larval fishes in North America. The existing catalog for the Fish Collection is a hand-written ledger in nine volumes. There are no data cross-references available (e.g., catalogs of holdings by state, species, etc.). Thus, the task of providing information on holdings to potential users is extremely burdensome. Computerization of the Fish Collection catalog will permit immediate and efficient respond to complex information requests and thus enhance use of the collection in research. Computerization will also make the collection records available to the user community over the internet so that researches can access the data at their convenience. Georeferencing the collection data will permit investigators to spatially relate material in the collection, ultimately providing distribution maps of holdings by species and other taxonomic groupings to potential users. Latitude and longitude coordinates provide a standard geographic referencing system that supersedes all other location descriptions and thus is important to networking efforts. Finally, having coordinate data will help enhance the Tulane Fish Collection as a repository for repetitive, time-series samples in ecological, environmental and conservation research.
