THE REPOSITORY WITHIN A DEPARTMENT– UNIQUE CHALLENGES AND SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES

The Indiana University (IU) Paleontology Collection is housed in the Department of Geological Sciences at Indiana University, having developed over the last 170 years. Today the collection contains an estimated 1.3 million whole specimens and 38,000 slide specimens, including more than 1,000 types specimens. An NSF-sponsored reorganization has been underway for the last three years, including reorganizing material into chronostratigraphic order, consolidating and re-packaging type materials for archival storage, removing non-paleontology related materials from the designated collections area, removing unlabeled specimens, and moving paper-based cataloguing into the Specify digital collection management system. Several challenges must still be overcome: recent addition of vertebrate specimens to our predominantly invertebrate collection requires special considerations for packaging and storage; micro-slides preserved with acetate offer continued preservation challenges. Continuing goals are to catalogue the backlog of unnumbered specimens, to improve handling of IU thesis type, figured and reference materials, and to digitize strategic parts of the collection. This effort is proceeding with student paid- and volunteer positions, as training future generations of curatorial researchers is one of our primary goals. We face unique challenges now as we proceed with a proposal to elevate campus-wide natural history collections into a collective IU Research Center, with funds requested to modernize access to the Collections through digitization of specimens for global researchers and Indiana citizens.