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

耶鲁皮博迪博物馆无脊椎动物动物部收藏了5万多张显微镜幻灯片，这些幻灯片是隶属于该博物馆的科学家在过去150年里进行研究的结果。这些幻灯片虽然在物理上得到了很好的策划，但从未被编目，因此这种独特的资源实际上是未知的，除了少数科学家和学生之外，所有人都无法获得。该项目的目标是将可访问性和可见性提高到适用于其余无脊椎动物动物学收藏的相同标准，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。这将包括使用现有的显微镜载玻片成像技术生成的数字图像。产生的数据和图像将被用作一个虚拟显微镜网站的基础，该网站将成为各级科学家、学生和教育工作者的宝贵教学资源。幻灯片收集涵盖了所有无脊椎动物分类群。对于一些门来说，这些是世界上任何地方都可以获得的最丰富的组织学收藏。这一奖项将确保这些藏品的安全，并首次将它们公开用于教学、研究和公共宣传。鉴于材料的不同性质，将使用各种技术(标准摄影、自动聚焦增强显微镜摄影、载玻片扫描)来产生载玻片的数字图像，材料由完整的个体标本、殖民形式的三维碎片和组织切片组成。产生的图像和相关数据将以多种方式提供给感兴趣的各方。来自幻灯片的可搜索文本数据将通过皮博迪博物馆网站以及内容提供商，包括iDigBio、全球生物多样性信息基金和发现耶鲁大学数字内容门户网站访问。幻灯片图像将提供：(1)所有幻灯片的中等分辨率图像，可通过供应商进行可缩放浏览；(2)选定幻灯片的一系列高分辨率图像，并由专家注释，通过皮博迪博物馆开发和托管的虚拟显微镜网站免费向学生和教育工作者提供。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.