Search for: All records

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. 

"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.