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Natural history collections are important depositories of biodiversity data. Digital photography of natural history collection specimens and subsequent dissemination of the resulting images on the web allow for the virtual discovery of these specimens, enhancing their accessibility to the target audience and the public in general. This presentation discusses digital photography of marine mollusks in collections, including some of the latest techniques for imaging of very small specimens, photography of specimens preserved in liquid, haptobionts, problems of color retention, transparency, 3-D photography, equipment, and other current areas of interest. Despite the focus on mollusks, the discussions can be extrapolated as generalities applicable to invertebrates from other phyla. The presentation also includes a discussion on equipment and the ideal digital parameters for imaging of natural history collection specimens, including image policies on acceptable file-format requirements for data hosts and aggregators such as iDigBio and others. (The presentation includes work funded in part by the NSF Thematic Collections Network grant award 2001528 “Mobilizing Millions of Mollusks from the Eastern Seaboard”). 

"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. 

In 2022, the accepted name for a marine gastropod species from Florida until then known as Conus an- abathrum Crosse, 1865, was replaced by C. floridanus Gabb, 1869. The main argument was that the type of C. anabathrum , a specimen with no type locality in the description, actually represents the eastern Pacific species C. scalaris Valenciennes, 1832. This allocation of the type of C. anabathrum to an eastern Pacific taxon was based on several factors, with shell shape as the main determinant. We demonstrate via geometric mor- phometrics that the type of C. anabathrum actually falls outside the morphospace of C. scalaris , belonging instead to the morphospace of the Floridian taxon. We also discuss other arguments presented to assign the type of C. anabathrum to the eastern Pacific species. These discussions and our geometric morphometric an- alytical results demonstrate that the type of C. anabathrum actually represents the Floridian species, and that C. anabathrum should be the accepted name. 

This article lists and comments on the primary and secondary types represented in the collection of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum (BMSM), on Sanibel, Florida, USA. The collection includes 464 type specimens, of which 15 are holotypes, representing 149 taxa, of which 145 are species and four subspecies. The BMSM collection is fully catalogued and posted online via the Museum’s website, in addition to iDigBio and GBIF. The publication of this annotated list intends to improve on the accessibility and promote this important group of name-bearing specimens, which includes, among other cases, types originating from orphaned collections and material poorly documented in the original descriptions. Eighty-two types were selected for illustration, and the photos of all BMSM types are available as part of the BMSM online collection catalog.