MILWAUKEE PUBLIC MUSEUM FOSSIL DIGITIZATION PROJECTS POWERED BY UNDERGRADUATE AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

The Geology collections of the Milwaukee Public Museum contain over 250,000 fossil and mineral specimens collected over the past 162 years. The collection began as a part of the Der Naturhistorische Verein von Wisconsin (The Natural History Society of Wisconsin) and was later donated to the city of Milwaukee becoming the core of MPM’s collection.

The majority of the data associated with these specimens is contained in handwritten labels and catalogs. The initial effort to digitize these collections began with NSF funding in the 1980's and resulted in an MS Access database of locality data. The effort linked the specimens with the locality and stratigraphy information and created over 10,000 records.

In 2012, MPM moved to a collection management system which integrated all the museums collections in a central database. The move to a new system sparked smaller digitizations projects that allowed undergraduate and high school students opportunities to work with the collections. For these projects students are trained in handling museum specimens, using Axiell EMu Database, and photographing labels and fossil specimens. The student help has been funded through two 3-year Institute of Museum and Library Services grants. A total of 15 high school and undergrad student interns have participated in 4 digitization projects over the last 8 summers resulting in over 16,000 paper-based specimen records being converted to digital format and generating nearly over 4000 specimen and label images.

Year	Project	Staff	Records	Images
2012	Locality Card	Student Vol	689	689
2012-2015	IMLS Silurian Reef Project	8 paid student interns	12,124	900
2018	Hell Creek Field Slides	High School Student vol	620	620
2018-2020	IMLS Ordovician Project	5 paid student interns	As of 6/20/19 2690	As of 6/20/2019 4115
Total	4 projects	15 students	16,693 records	6324 images