[NHCOLL-L:1452] Marine Biodiversity Processing Center

[Phillip Hoover]

Marine Biodiversity Processing Center

Museums today are being overwhelmed with diverse incoming, unsorted
collections resulting from both field work and from institutional
donations where storage of these collections is no longer an option.  At
the same time, there is increasing pressure to make data from these
collections available to researchers around the world.  To address these
problems, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County created the
Marine Biodiversity Processing Center in early 2001.  The Center serves
as the clearing house for unsorted incoming invertebrate collections.  

The Center staff:
	collate historical information about the collections,
	assess the condition of specimens, containers, and labels,
	perform first-level sorting,
	curate specimens and prepare labels as necessary, and
	database collection and lot information.
Finally, sorted material is turned over to the taxon-specific sections
(polychaetes, echinoderms, mollusks, and crustaceans).

More information about our collections and the Center is available at
http://collections.nhm.org.  A NSF Collections Support Grant received in
early 2002 will greatly facilitate the rate at which newly curated,
sorted, and databased collections are made available to Museum
researchers and the scientific community.