The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History has been an independent institution dedicated to collections and research since 1923. The Museum's Department of Invertebrate Zoology has grown dramatically during the past decade, and its mollusk collection now comprises nearly 200,000 specimen lots and more that 1,700 type specimens. This collection ranks among the finest in North America, and is one of the exceptional repositories for mollusks in the region. The collections will be moving into much larger, newly constructed quarters, and a new endowed Curatorship has recently been filled with a mollusk specialist. Dr. Eric Hochberg, Curator of Mollusks, has crafted a long-range plan for growth and curation of the collection. The first phase involves installation of new storage cabinets in the recently completed collections building. The cephalopod collection that was donated by the Allan Hancock Foundation of the University of Southern California will be integrated with the rest of the collection. The proposed improvements to the mollusk collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History will establish this institution as a growing center for research and curation. Researchers in the areas of ecology, biogeography, systematics, and evolutionary biology (to name a few) will be given new and easy access to important specimen collections. Natural history collections such as this are indispensable resources in the study of biological diversity.
