DEVONIAN IMLS DIGITIZATION PROJECT AT THE FIELD MUSEUM AND MILWAUKEE PUBLIC MUSEUM

The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) along with its partner the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) are in the second year of a three year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Museums for America grant to support the conversion of our Devonian fossil collections’ paper-based catalog records to electronic form. The Devonian collections at both institutions were collected over the past 130 years by curators, research geologists, and amateur collectors. The fossil specimens to be digitized are primarily local marine invertebrate fossils from the Midwest and Great Lakes region. The cooperative effort will protect and preserve data associated with the fossil specimens and increase accessibility to these data, making information regarding these collections more widely, accurately, and engagingly available to diverse audiences including: researchers, K-12 teachers and students, and the general public. The three-year project will use on-site data entry technicians at each institution to convert the approximately 37,000 paper based catalog records to a digital collections management system. Conversion to Darwin Core digital format and online access will ensure preservation and concurrently expand public access and facilitate scientific research. For this grant over 60,000 images of the original labels and fossils will be captured and made available for online data aggregators. Over the three years of the grant 15 paid interns will be trained as data technicians, working with the museum collections and learning how to enter data in our EMu collections management software and photograph fossils. This current project and past digitization projects utilizing paid undergraduate interns have resulted in over 50,000 digital catalog records being added to the FMNH Fossil Invertebrate database, more than half of all digital records and over 100,000 images have been created.