CSBR: Natural History Collections: Cataloging and imaging the Yale Peabody Museum Invertebrate Zoology microscope slide collection

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The Yale Peabody Museum Invertebrate Zoology Division houses a collection of more than 50,000 microscope slides, created as a result of research by scientists affiliated with the museum over the last 150 years. These slides, although well curated physically, have never been cataloged and this unique resource is therefore virtually unknown and unavailable to all but a few scientists and students. The goal of this project is to raise the level of accessibility and visibility to the same standard that has been applied to the rest of the Invertebrate Zoology collection, and make the specimens and associated data available to scientists and students via the museum's searchable web interfaces. This will include digital images, generated using available microscope slide imaging technology. The resulting data and images will be used as the basis for a virtual microscopy website that will be an invaluable teaching resource for scientists, students and educators at all levels of inquiry. The slide collection spans the full breadth of invertebrate taxa. For some phyla, these are the richest histological collections available anywhere in the world. This award will secure these collections and, for the first time, make them publically available for teaching, research, and public outreach. A variety of techniques (standard photography, automated focus-enhanced microscope photography, slide scanning) will be used to produce digital images of the slides, given the varied nature of the material, which is composed of whole mounts of individual specimens, three dimensional fragments of colonial forms, and histological sections. The resulting images and associated data will be served to interested parties in several ways. Searchable text data from the slides will be accessible through the Peabody Museum website, and content providers including iDigBio, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and the Discover Yale Digital Content portal. Slide images will be available as: (1) moderate resolution images for all slides available for zoomable browsing via the providers; and (2) a series of hi-resolution images for selected slides with annotations by experts, made freely available for students and educators through a virtual microscopy website to be developed and hosted by the Peabody Museum. More information about the museum and its collections are available at: http://peabody.yale.edu/collections/invertebrate-zoology.