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1. Putting U.S. collections on the map: collaborative digitization and innovation

   Bieler, Rüdiger; Bogan, Arthur E; Criales, Maria M; Dietl, Gregory P; Duda_Jr, Tom F; Fuchs, Corinne E; Giribet, G; Goodheart, Jessica A; Leal, José H; Lee, Taehwan; et al (October 2025, The Nautilus)

   Leal, JH; Bieler, R (Ed.)

   Among biocollections, mollusks are a particularly powerful resource for a wide range of studies, including biogeography, conservation, ecology, environmental monitoring, evolutionary biology, and systematics. U.S. mollusk collections are housed in stand-alone natural history museums, at universities, and in a variety of governmental and non-governmental institutions. Differing in their histories, specializations, and uses, they share common needs for long-term development, and collectively contribute to biodiversity knowledge at regional, national, and global scales. Commitment by dedicated staff, collectors, and volunteers, institutional investments, philanthropy, and governmental funding have built and maintained these collections and their support infrastructure. Efforts by the North American malacological collection community since the early 1970s led to coordination in database design but left the data isolated in individual institutions. Collection digitization developed through a combination of individual/institutional initiatives and federally supported projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Advances in digital technology enabled the shift toward nationally and globally unified collections. Networking and collaboration were greatly accelerated by NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, which created a central coordinating organization (iDigBio) and funded Thematic Collections Network (TCN) projects. One such TCN was developed to mobilize nearly 90% of the known U.S. museum-collections-based data of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts (Mobilizing Millions of Marine Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard—ESB). The project, involving 16 museum collections (plus the Smithsonian Institution as federal partner), combines data from approximately 4.5 million specimens collected from the ESB region and makes them available to the TCN portal InvertEBase and other aggregators such as iDigBio and GBIF. In addition to fostering community and expanding the corpus of available digitized mollusk records through new data entry and georeferencing (GEOLocate, CoGe) and standardizing taxonomy, the project drove key innovations for the invertebrate collections community. For instance, it worked with the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) group to create a new Darwin Core standard term, “Vitality”, expanded GEOLocate to support complex geospatial types, integrated global elevation and bathymetric datasets directly into georeferencing workflow, and developed various education and outreach public outreach products. Synthesizing from the 15 following articles with individual histories of ESB-participating mollusk collections, several topics are discussed—such as what defines a “good” mollusk collection in the digital age and the importance of federal support for this national resource. 

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2. The Malacological Collections Histories project: A preface

   Leal, José H; Bieler, Rüdiger (October 2025, The Nautilus)

   Leal, José H; Bieler, Rüdiger (Ed.)

   Welcome to this special edition of our journal. This issue brings together the historical accounts of fifteen major museum based molluscan collections in the U.S., in addition to an introductory article prepared by curators, collection managers, and collection associates involved in the project. Throughout its 139-year existence, The Nautilus has endeavored to promote collection-based malacological research, so it is only natural that the journal would be the vehicle to disseminate this “historical” compilation. The articles are an outcome of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Thematic Collections Network (TCN) grants collectively known as Mobilizing Millions of Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard (ESB). Each tells the story of an institutional mollusk collection from its earliest days to its present involvement in community-wide efforts. The introductory article reflects on the changing roles of U.S. malacological collections in a digital world, summarizes common needs and concerns, and points to the uniqueness and innovative nature of the ESB project. The editors want to acknowledge the indispensable assistance of the following peer reviewers, many of whom reviewed more than one manuscript in the course of this work: Arthur E. Bogan, Christopher Boyko, Eugene V. Coan, Kevin Cummings, Emilio F. García, Daniel Graf, Lindsey Groves, M. G. Harasewych, Alan Kabat, Rafael Lemaitre, Charles Lydeard, Paula M. Mikkelsen, Aydin Örstan, Shirley Pomponi, Carrie Schweitzer, Elizabeth K. Shea, Leslie Skibinski, John Slapcinsky, Ángel Valdés, and some others who preferred to remain anonymous. This assemblage of historical accounts could only come to fruition thanks to the cooperative and collegial environment of the ESB consortium; we hope that you find as much enjoyment reading these narratives as we did organizing and editing them. Support for this publication under National Science Foundation award DBI-2001510 is gratefully acknowledged. 

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3. “Mobilizing Millions of Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard”: Digitization activities at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum & Aquarium

   Leal, José H; Whitt, Chris (April 2024, Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum & Aquarium)

   Leal, José H (Ed.)

   "Mobilizing Millions of Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard" (ESB) is a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation that improves our knowledge of mollusks from the East and Gulf coasts of the US. The four-year project is making taxonomically vetted, and completely georeferenced occurrence data for 535,000 specimen lots representing 4.5 million specimens available online on the iDigBio, GBIF, and OBIS data aggregators. The ESB region includes 18 states, nearly 6,000 km from Maine to Texas. In the ESB project, 17 major US collections, containing 85% of molluscan holdings from the ESB in all US molluscan collections, are collaborating. The ESB project improves reliability of and access to molluscan collection data for examining changes in distribution, morphology, population size, and genetic variation within and across species. The Museum collection had been digitized (cataloged electronically) at the start of the project (including 21,283 ESB lots); accordingly, the main goals of the project were cleaning data (improving the taxonomy, locality, dates, collecting data) and adding geolocation (geographic coordinates) to these lots. In addition, since the beginning of the project, we digitized an additional 3,897 ESB newly acquired lots consisting of 14,500 specimens. Other achievements are cleaning and standardizing collection metadata for 12,730 lots, adding geolocation data for 23,952 lots and photographing 320 lots. Currently, the total number of ESB lots is 25,180, of which 24,201 have geolocation data. 

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4. Historical review of the molluscan collection at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum & Aquarium, Sanibel, Florida

   Leal, JH; Whitt, C (October 2025, The Nautilus)

   Leal, JH; Bieler, R (Ed.)

   This article presents a brief history of the collection at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum & Aquarium from its inception to the present, with goals for the future. The molluscan collection is the youngest of its kind in the United States. It is worldwide in scope, with emphases on Southwest Florida, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean, representing the amalgamation of a considerable number of private and institutional collections. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Founding Director R. Tucker Abbott orchestrated the initial efforts to amass specimens to create a reference collection. Digitization of the collection started in late 1996, about a year after the opening of the Shell Museum. The authors discuss the collection composition, the role that accreditation with the American Alliance of Museums played in the growth of the collection, support of federal grants, sharing of collection metadata in global data aggregators, recent participation in the federally funded “Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard”, and other outcomes of the collection coming of age. 

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5. Rapid development and digitization of the Recent mollusk collection at the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville

   Slapcinsky, John; Bemis, Amanda; Portell, Roger; Auffenberg, Kurt; Paulay, Gustav (October 2025, The Nautilus)

   The Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) currently houses nearly 580,000 specimen-lots of close to 3 million specimens of recent mollusks. It is one of the largest collections of its type in North America and, except for new donations, its collection data is entirely accessible online. The collection has grown rapidly since its founding in the early 20th century, especially in the past 50 years. While global in scope, the collection is especially strong in material from North and South America, the Caribbean, Madagascar, Pacific Ocean islands, and south Asia. Holdings have been greatly enriched by biodiversity surveys conducted by museum staff and research associates and by acquisition of relinquished institutional and private collections. Field collections often have linked voucher specimens, tissues, sequence data, and digital images. The FLMNH mollusk collection is an important resource for systematics, biogeography, biodiversity studies, and education. 

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