The ADBC program at NSF is charged with digitizing natural history collections in the United States and making the resulting images and associated data available to the general public and the broader scientific community. The current project at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) was initiated as part of the InvertNet Thematic Collections Network (TCN), which proposed digitizing whole insect drawers from fourteen university and institutional collections from throughout the Midwest. The Carnegie Museum insect collection is vast, with an estimated ten million plus pinned specimens. To this end, we imaged a total of 3,060 individual whole drawers from our collection. Specimens in these drawers included representatives from five major insect orders, including Coleoptera (beetles), Diptera (flies), Hymenoptera (wasps and bees), Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and Orthoptera (grasshoppers and kin). The vast majority of the specimens imaged, however, were beetles from lesser known or poorly studied groups. Roughly one million specimens from these drawers were imaged as a result of the project and these fell into 163 different insect families. Almost 41,000 of these specimens have had their label data completely captured in database format and are ready for dissemination and use. The collection of images captured during this project are available online, as a virtual museum of sorts, and can be found at http://iz.carnegiemnh.org/DataEntry. Additional images will be added after they are post-processed. The image galleries on the site can be easily browsed by anyone with a modern web browser.

Another focus of our project was to begin imaging our glass slide collection of Siphonaptera (fleas). The fleas are a very important group of insects because they are vectors of disease which can and do adversely impact human health around the world. The 70,000 flea slides in the Carnegie collection (donated by R. Traub) represent one of the largest collection holdings of fleas worldwide. As a result of this project, we were able to 1) individually label the entire collection with unique barcodes, 2) begin imaging the slides and the associated notebooks, and 3) start capturing label data into an online searchable database. Since this is such an important group, we hope that the data and images from our collection might enable future taxonomic, biological or medical investigations of flea vectors and aid in research on flea-borne diseases.

This project also engaged a large number of work-study students from four local universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, and Chatham University. These students gained experience with museum studies by working hands-on with specimens in a large entomological collection and they received training in insect specimen care, preparation, curation, databasing, and digitization as they carried out project-related tasks. Museum visitors were engaged with the project in a variety of ways, such as through behind-the-scenes tours in the insect collection, various public programming events, and at the museum’s Moriarty scientific lecture series, which is open to the public.

Last Modified: 09/28/2017
Modified by: James W Fetzner