IMPROVING COLLECTION ACCESS: EIGHT DIGITIZATION PROJECTS OVER NINE YEARS

Over the last 125 years, the Field Museum has built up a collection of over two million fossil invertebrate specimens divided into ~350,000 specimen lots. Most of the data associated with these specimens are paper based labels and handwritten catalog entries. Less than 300 specimens are available on public display in the museum. The remainder of the collection is stored in 558 cabinets in a behind-the-scenes area reserved primarily for graduate students and researchers. Occasionally school groups, scouts, science Olympians, fossil clubs, and special visitors receive behind the scenes tours, but the narrow aisles, poor lighting, and delicate fossils restricts the group size to 15.

Efforts to increase access to the fossil invertebrate collection by digitization started in the 1980’s with an NSF funded digitization project for the Mazon Creek collection that resulted in 35,000 digital records. Over the last nine years we completed seven digitization projects and are currently working on our eighth. These projects are responsible for digitizing 45,231 specimens and the creation of over 80,000 photographs and multimedia records. The projects range from small in-house efforts involving 246 specimens to two 3-year Institute of Museum and Library Services funded digitization projects that have digitized nearly 30,000 specimens. The focus of these projects have ranged from working on fossil groups from a particular time or region such as Mazon Creek or Silurian reef fossils to digitizing new acquisitions, and to research projects that require digitization. However, at this rate it will take an additional 18 years to digitize the 150,000 specimen lots that make up the Paleozoic systematic collection, the core of the collection, and 63 years to digitize the entire fossil invertebrate collection.

In an effort to make the collections as widely available as possible now, we are investigating other methods to increase access including: collections based websites such as the Virtual Silurian Reef, presentations using online platforms like Zoom, whole drawer digitization, Citizen Science data entry, and virtual tours.