A Dry Collection Talk: Revitalizing the San Diego Natural History Museum Marine Invertebrate Collection

In 2021, the San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) received funding from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to improve the condition, management, and accessibility of the dry Marine Invertebrate Collection (IMLS MA-249928-OMS-21). The collection is one of the oldest at the museum and dates back to the founding of the San Diego Society of Natural History in 1874. It is a large, dry collection of primarily gastropods and bivalves and is estimated to contain nearly five million specimens in over 91,000 specimen lots, which include 135 holotypes and 856 paratypes. The collection has lacked dedicated staff for nearly 25 years and suffered from data inaccessibility and inadequate physical and taxonomic curation (Fig. 1). However, this project attempts to mitigate previous issues through increased staff dedication, specimen digitization, collection analysis, and rehousing. The research value of the collection cannot be overstated, both in terms of geographic and temporal uniqueness. While the collection is worldwide in representation, it houses some of the earliest known collections from the museum’s focal region: southern California and the peninsula of Baja California. The collection also houses an important regional collection of land snails, perhaps the most impacted fauna of the current mass extinction (Cowie et al. 2017, Regnier et al. 2009). Historically, each specimen lot in the collection was recorded on a paper catalog card (Fig. 2). After scanning all cards, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was employed with moderate results. The OCR dataset required large-scale data cleaning in Microsoft Excel to produce an initial digital dataset. Iterative bulk updates to select fields using data keys helped minimize the number of fields for manual review. Manual review of remaining fields for each database record was completed by trained volunteers. This approach maximized our dataset’s quality and culminated in the collection’s first publicly accessible digital specimen catalog. The SDNHM Marine Invertebrate Collection records can be found online via InvertEBase-Symbiota portal (Gries et al. 2014). Using the digitized collection records, data analyses yielded an incredible geographic spread, extreme data quality disparities, many unlabeled specimens and outdated scientific names. Approximately 20% of catalog cards and their associated digital records lack scientific names. But for a majority of these specimens, the determination exists ei