CSBR: Natural History Collections: Cataloging and imaging the Yale Peabody Museum Invertebrate Zoology microscope slide collection

耶鲁大学皮博迪博物馆无脊椎动物部门收藏了5万多张显微镜载玻片，这些载玻片是过去150年来隶属于博物馆的科学家们研究的结果。这些幻灯片虽然经过精心整理，但从未被编目，因此除了少数科学家和学生之外，几乎所有人都不知道这种独特的资源。该项目的目标是提高可访问性和可见性的水平，达到与其他无脊椎动物馆藏相同的标准，并通过博物馆的可搜索网络界面向科学家和学生提供标本和相关数据。这将包括使用可用的显微镜载玻片成像技术生成的数字图像。由此产生的数据和图像将用作虚拟显微镜网站的基础，该网站将成为科学家、学生和各级教育工作者的宝贵教学资源。幻灯片集涵盖了无脊椎动物分类群的全部宽度。对于某些门来说，这些是世界上最丰富的组织学收藏。该奖项将确保这些藏品的安全，并首次将它们公开用于教学、研究和公众宣传。各种技术（标准摄影，自动聚焦增强显微镜摄影，载玻片扫描）将被用于产生载玻片的数字图像，考虑到材料的不同性质，它由单个标本的整个挂载，殖民地形式的三维碎片和组织学切片组成。产生的图像和相关数据将以几种方式提供给感兴趣的各方。可搜索的幻灯片文本数据将通过皮博迪博物馆网站和内容提供商（包括iDigBio、全球生物多样性信息设施和发现耶鲁数字内容门户网站）访问。幻灯片图像将以以下方式提供：(1)通过提供程序可缩放浏览的所有幻灯片的中等分辨率图像；(2)通过皮博迪博物馆开发和管理的虚拟显微镜网站，为学生和教育工作者免费提供一系列高分辨率的精选幻灯片图片，并附有专家的注释。有关博物馆及其藏品的更多信息，请访问：http://peabody.yale.edu/collections/invertebrate-zoology。

The Yale Peabody Museum Invertebrate Zoology Division houses a collection of more than 50,000 microscope slides, created as a result of research by scientists affiliated with the museum over the last 150 years. These slides, although well curated physically, have never been cataloged and this unique resource is therefore virtually unknown and unavailable to all but a few scientists and students. The goal of this project is to raise the level of accessibility and visibility to the same standard that has been applied to the rest of the Invertebrate Zoology collection, and make the specimens and associated data available to scientists and students via the museum's searchable web interfaces. This will include digital images, generated using available microscope slide imaging technology. The resulting data and images will be used as the basis for a virtual microscopy website that will be an invaluable teaching resource for scientists, students and educators at all levels of inquiry.The slide collection spans the full breadth of invertebrate taxa. For some phyla, these are the richest histological collections available anywhere in the world. This award will secure these collections and, for the first time, make them publically available for teaching, research, and public outreach. A variety of techniques (standard photography, automated focus-enhanced microscope photography, slide scanning) will be used to produce digital images of the slides, given the varied nature of the material, which is composed of whole mounts of individual specimens, three dimensional fragments of colonial forms, and histological sections. The resulting images and associated data will be served to interested parties in several ways. Searchable text data from the slides will be accessible through the Peabody Museum website, and content providers including iDigBio, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and the Discover Yale Digital Content portal. Slide images will be available as: (1) moderate resolution images for all slides available for zoomable browsing via the providers; and (2) a series of hi-resolution images for selected slides with annotations by experts, made freely available for students and educators through a virtual microscopy website to be developed and hosted by the Peabody Museum. More information about the museum and its collections are available at: http://peabody.yale.edu/collections/invertebrate-zoology.