Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum

The Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum will complete the second and final phase of its comprehensive, high-priority initiative of cataloging mollusks, shells, and complementary materials, enabling the museum to gain critical intellectual control over the specialized natural history collection it holds in public trust. Phase two will involve processing, identifying, cataloging, label-printing, and online posting of more than 21,000 lots, the remainder of the nearly 110,000 total lots in the collection. By making this collection being more readily available to researchers, advanced amateurs, students, and scientists, the museum is contributing to the global knowledge base on molluscan diversity. The long-term impact of the project is the availability and value of natural science collections to studies on biodiversity, earth and environmental sciences, medicine, and other fields of human endeavor.