In a partnership among the Beaty Biodiversity Museum’s Fish Collection, UBC Library’s Digital Initiatives, and Fishbase, the field collection records for over 850,000 fishes are being digitized.
The project will digitize field records (collection and habitat data) associated with individual fish collections and link them to an existing digital database (accessible through www.fishbase.org) that provides worldwide access to over 11,000 collection records spanning a 108-year period in the UBC (Beaty) Fish Collection. The digitization project with the library will also provide critical security for these historical records – a key goal of the Digital Initiative -which are now only stored as hard copies.
(Top) A field collection sheet from 1904; (bottom) A field collection sheet (1959) from a Panamanian exhibition representing more than 20 species co-occurrences.
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum’s collection of fishes was the first one to be deposited and accessible in Fishbase – one of the world’s premier and groundbreaking digital archives – and the merging of these locality records with the associated metadata should prove to be an invaluable resource accessible to all with an internet connection. For more information, visit diginit.library.ubc.ca and www.fishbase.org
A field collection sheet from a 1959 collection near Sumas, BC, indicating eight co-occurring species and associated habitat variables.
Written by: Eric Taylor, Curator of the Fish Collection at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum