EXPANDING ACCESS TO DUNN-SEILER MUSEUM FOSSIL SPECIMENS THROUGH VIRTUAL COLLECTIONS

Expanding public geoliteracy is an important mission among geoscience education researchers. One way to promote geoscience literacy, or geoliteracy, is to digitize and make readily available geological specimens and samples (e.g., fossils, minerals, rocks) and the accompanying level-appropriate educational materials that explain integral concepts in the geosciences. The Omeka platform enables the digitization and display of images and metadata from specimens in various collections such as museums. While Omeka has many benefits to museum collection curation, there are also challenges associated with the platform. When initiating a digital collection for the fossil collections at the Dunn-Seiler Museum at Mississippi State University, we identified challenges that include price of software, the format used to input the metadata, and lack of resources for collection developers. An additional challenge will be that not all end users are technologically savvy and have access to virtual collections. Even with these challenges, Omeka will allow the Dunn-Seiler Museum to display fossil specimens on a virtual platform that is globally accessible. The Omeka platform has the additional benefit that the Dunn-Seiler Museum collections are available after the museum has closed. This will make our fossil specimens accessible to students and researchers alike, for a variety of applications.