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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.