Like most moderately sized insect collections, and certainly all LARGE collections, we don’t have an accurate count of the specimens stored in our cabinets. There are simply too many specimens, collected over too long a time span (oldest specimen I know of at the Frost was collected in 1880), with too many people involved and too much activity (loans, gifts, etc.), without having a system in place from the beginning. For example, we know we have 32,780 slide preparations with aphids on them, but each prep entombs one to six (or more) individuals. So maybe we have >100,000 aphids! Who knows? The latest numbers we have (from 1990), which are based on real counts for many taxa but only best guesses for others, suggest we have 1,880,351 specimens.
Retrospective inventorying is chronophagous, for sure, but what about simply cataloging our taxonomic coverage? How many families, genera, and species of arthropods are represented in the Frost’s research collection? That seems like a surmountable challenge and also an exceedingly useful dataset that could draw users and stakeholders in. The numbers we do have (again, from 1990) indicate we have just under 15,000 species represented in the collection (actual numbers: 455 families, 5108 genera, 14,857 species). Not too shabby, but the collection has definitely grown in the 23 years since this last audit.
It’s time to update the inventory and to upgrade it from paper(!) to a proper database. We started the process a couple weeks ago, and early results can be viewed in this Google Docs spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/PSUCinventory
Check it out! And please feel free to add comments if you see misspellings or other inaccuracies (it’s as easy as right-clicking on a cell or range of cells). It’s not a proper database yet, but more on that later.