The research collections of birds and mammals at The Field Museum rank among the world's largest and most comprehensive. Both include virtually all families, most genera and about 85% and 65% of the world's known bird and mammal species, respectively. A century of international collecting activity has enriched these collections with tropical taxa that are poorly represented elsewhere. Currently, the catalogued collections include more than 420,000 bird specimens and 160,000 mammal specimens. All of these specimens have been curated, installed, and entered into computer databases; computer records have been verified against specimen labels and shelf-and drawercontents for all but a small fraction of each collection. Encyclopedic coverage and high-quality modern preparations of these collections attract heavy research use. Both Bird and Mammal collections rank among the nation's most heavily utilized collections in terms of numbers of scientific visitors and number and size of specimen loans; information on these collections is now available over the Internet, and more will be made available by the end of 1997. The impact of these collections on the scientific community can be gauged by the number of publications appearing each year that are based entirely or in part on the Field Museum's collections. Since 1980, the Bird and Mammal collections and facilities have served as the basis for more than a 1200 articles. Bird and Mammal personnel continue to build the collections via active field programs in the Neotropics, Africa, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia, as well as in the United States. In contrast to historic collections modern collections have attempted to accommodate the diversity of approaches to systematic zoology by preserving a wide range of preparation types, now often including tissues for gentic analyses. Since 1976 some 12,000 tubes of avian tissues and 10,000 tubes of mammal tissues have been received. This project will assist in the tra nsfer of the frozen tissue collections to new, expanded and safer storage. The two collections, which will remain separate, will be deposited in a newly-established storage facility, consisting of liquid nitrogen storage vessels. The new installation will increase capacity for archival storage from 25,000 tubes to 60,000 tubes. As tubes are transferred from one storage system to another, the project will (1) verify existing database record for each tissue tube, (2) determine the unique catalogue number in Bird and Mammal catalogues that corresponds to each field number, (3) generate and affix a bar-coded and numbered label to each tube, and (4) record its location in the new storage system. The end result will be that these collections will be archived at a temperature at which we can be assured no degradation will occur, and through the use of the bar- coding label system, these collections will be more- effectively labeled and immediately connected to the computerized databases of our main collections. Thus, handling this valuable material will be more efficient and less harmful to long-term preservation.
