The Ichthyology Collection of the California Academy of Sciences contains more than 200,000 lots of specimens, and includes historically important collections that have been transferred from Stanford and Indiana Universities, and from the George Vanderbilt Foundation. Drs. Tomio Iwamoto and William Eschmeyer, Curators in charge of the Collection, have embarked on a plan to computerize all specimen lots, in order to make them more readily available to the research community. They plan to begin with data entry for freshwater fishes from South America, and this will add important data to a multi-institution international database project supported by the National Science Foundation, coordinated by Dr. Scott Schaefer of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The proposed database of South American fishes is an unprecedented effort to link separate databases of museum specimens to create a wide-area network with open access to researchers. Once completed, the database will be a unique and heavily used resource for systematic, evolutionary, ecological, and biogeographic research.
