Essig Museum of Entomology

Essig Museum of Entomology

The Essig Museum of Entomology has by far the largest specimen collection on campus (estimated at 12 million records and over 30,000 species) but until 2003 had no digital catalog system, probably due to the sheer mass of the collection. Few entomology museums have digitized their holdings. Taking advantage of the need for a new design from scratch, Essig decided to plan a collection management system that is completely online, that would integrate all aspects of data management within the museum including specimen records, photos, accessions and loans, data entry and correction, and publications. Essig had begun using the DLP Personal Library system in 2002 to scan California Insect Survey journals, which would provide a start for assembling species lists within the museum. In 2003 Essig began working with the Digital Library Project to create a web-based specimen database with data entry capabilities modeled on previous DLP projects such as UCMP online, AmphibiaWeb, and CalPhotos. In April 2003 the first specimen records came online, and a few months later, accessions and collector tables were added. Early in 2004 a set of 12,000 aphid records, along with a photo of each specimen, was added, and by the end of the year the number of digitized records had reached around 20,000. A web-based data entry form which directly updated the specimen database was added in late 2004. A few months later, a database of 42,000 unique species names came online which will be integrated into the data entry system. Records in all the databases can be corrected by any Essig staff with the proper permissions. As of this writing (May 2005), a number of museum scientists and faculty are using the data entry form to add new specimens not only for Essig but also for other entomology museums that do not have digital cataloging in place. The next challenge for Essig is to obtain funding to digitize its existing specimens – a daunting task.[1]