Sandall, E. L. (2016) Bringing the George H. and Alice F. Beatty Odonata collection into the digital age. Argia 28(4): 33–34 (preprint – DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.4490552.v1)
Abstract.—A collection of over 60,000 odonate specimens can tell many stories. It can show the successful preservation of dragonflies and damselflies, as well as the differences in prey and habitat associations between taxa. The field notes can share observations and collecting details with those who may have never seen a particular species in the field. A collection of this size can also demonstrate the importance of natural history museums and their contents, enabling biodiversity research decades later. Of particular interest is the mobility of collections in the digital age, as evidenced through the U.S. NSF’s investment in Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) grants, liberating natural history data on which novel research can be conducted. Over the past two years, I have worked with the collection of George H. and Alice F. Beatty at the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State University in order to digitize the specimens in the collection, catalog them, and find ways to use their data through an NSF Thematic Collections Network (TCN) grant for digitization.