Rehousing and Digitization of the Museum of Comparative Zoology Recent Invertebrate Microscope Slide Collections

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Natural history museum specimens vary tremendously in size and preservation style, ranging from giant squid kept in vats of ethanol, to butterflies pinned in trays, to ticks mounted on glass microscope slides. At the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, the collections of Invertebrate Zoology, Malacology, and Entomology house about 50,000 slide-mounted specimens. While restoration and digitization efforts have improved access to macroscopic specimens, those mounted on glass microscope slides are in dire need of rehabilitation and updated record keeping. By creating digital records of these slides and making the data available online, the specimens and their biological data will be made discoverable to researchers and the public worldwide, and fixing and rehousing them will ensure that these slides are available for posterity. Methods developed as part of this project for slide handling and restoration will be shared with other museums to expand the impact of this work. This project will engage the public through an exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a platform to showcase the global importance of our research and the insights that slide-mounted specimens provide. This project will also offer paid internships for undergraduate students, providing them with hands-on experience in the curation of biological collections. Slide-mounted specimens enable examination of morphological structures of invertebrates, and also serve as a long-term preservation method for whole or parts of animals. Slides in the three living invertebrate collections at MCZ suffer from a range of problems: 1) the lack of standardized storage systems, with many slides stored in trays and drawers scattered throughout the collections, 2) decaying mounting media that are sensitive to environmental conditions, necessitating restoration efforts, and 3) absence of any digital record in a database, which combined with the distributed storage of slides, makes it difficult to discover and locate specimens. To address these challenges, this project will locate all slide-mounted specimens, repair slides as needed, rehouse them in modern cabinets to ensure long-term preservation, and create digital records of each slide. High-quality pictures will be taken of the approximately 3,000 slide-mounted type specimens. These are of particular value to the scientific community because each type is the physical specimen from which a species was originally described. All specimen data acquired in this project will be made publicly available via the MCZbase database, which also connects to repositories such as iDigBio, GBIF, and the InvertEBase Symbiota portal. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.