A grant has been awarded to Yale University's Peabody Museum under the direction of Dr. Leo Buss for collection improvement and preparation of an online database for the fluid-preserved invertebrate zoology collections. The collection goes back 160 years to early surveys of the Atlantic Coast invertebrates and contains historically important specimens, some of them collected before the use of formalin, which means these older specimens may be valuable sources of DNA for modern research. The project will expand on an earlier award that supported the re-integration of these fluid preserved specimens into the main body of the invertebrate zoology collections in a new facility with improved temperature and humidity controls. Storage containers and preservative will be upgraded for each specimen lot, and selected specimens will be digitally imaged for viewing on the internet. Records of data for the specimens will be available in a searchable online database at the Peabody web site. The renovated storage conditions will render the specimens accessible to visitors, faculty and students. In addition, the Peabody Museum's website will provide specimen data and images for education programs for K-12 students and the several hundred thousand visitors to the museum each year. An Evolutions After-School Program, lectures, and other events will use the collection resources to reach out to underrepresented groups and the interested public.
The goal of this NSF grant was to make an important historical and scientific collection more accessible and useable to those wishing to conduct specimen based research on (specifically) fluid-preserved material. A very significant portion (more than 60%) of the material included in this grant were collected by the United States Fish Commission during the late 19th century, specimens of which formed the basis of our knowledge of the composition and distribution of fish and invertebrates of the entire American Atlantic coast. Much of the remainder of the collection derived from other important historical collections (Yale Seychelles Expedition 1957-1958; Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899); collections of the former Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory and the expeditions of the "Pawnee") and therefore represent a part of the history of American scientific exploration. To make the collection much more useable to researchers, the specimens were moved from a crowded, difficult to access basement storage room to a brand new facility, the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center. Environmental controls (temperature and humidity) in the new building ensure the long-term archival of this valuable material. Physical curation involved cleaning of jars, replacing old-style glassware and adding new preservative (ethyl alcohol) as necessary. During the 3.5 years project, nearly 21,000 specimen "lots" (one-many specimens of a particular kind sharing the same collection history) were processed. In addition to physical needs, the specimen data of each lot was either updated or added new to the museum's electronic database. All specimen-based data (collection locality, date collected, collector, expedition, etc.) for the material processed by this grant are available scientists and the interested public through a searchable database accessible at the Peabody Museum website (www.peabody.yale.edu/collections/search-collections). In addition to physical curation and electronic data enhancement, two other products were produced by this grant. First, a dataset of all Atlantic Ocean stations (total equals 663 stations) from which specimens were collected by the United States Coast Survey and the United States Fish Commission during the 19th century and 2) a representative set of digital images of these and other invertebrates (http://peabody.yale.edu/collections/invertebrate-zoology). The USCS and USFC datasets are available for complete download, or viewable as a subset of the total distinguished by collecting vessel (e.g. USFC Steamer Albatross, etc.). Second, 500 specimen images of various invertebrates processed by this grant are now available through the museum's searchable database. Most images are of moderate resolution and include a scale bar for reference; higher resolution for scientific and educational purposes are available upon request.
