General Holdings

Housed on the fourth floor of Cordley Hall, the Arthropod Collection at
Oregon State University is the largest repository of Pacific Northwest
insects in the world. Estimated to possess between 2.7 and 3 million
specimens, the OSU collection ranks among the top university owned
insect collections in the United States. The collection has broad
taxonomic representation with exceptional holdings among the
Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Diptera and Hemiptera- strengths which largely
reflect the academic interests of past faculty and curators. The
majority of material originates from the Pacific Northwest, however the
collection also has many specimens from Europe, Asia, Central and South
America and Australia.

The collection owes its present day stature to the efforts of OSU
faculty, students (past and present) and through a number of
significant donations from private donors and other institutions. The
history of the collection from its inception in the 1800's to the late
1980's was compiled by Gerald M. Adams and will soon be available in
electronic form at this site. We are also compiling a list of
significant donors/contributors to the collection which will highlight not only the specimen donations but major curatorial accomplishments.

Digital Access to OSAC holdings: The estimated 2.7 million
specimens that constitute our holdings are currently not available
electronically. We expect to have limited access to some of our
holdings (beetles and Lepidoptera) by the fall/winter of 2008.
Providing digital access to our material is a major priority for us,
and our chief task is to generate the actual digital data. 
Althgouh various parts of the OSAC have been databased in the past,
this has never been done in a way as to be easily 'verified' or
reliably updated. Now that we are provisioning all our specimens, unit
trays and drawers with unique serial numbers, the data associated with
our holdings can be inventoried, managed and disseminated.

To accomplish this task, OSAC has hired a number of student workers who
are actively databasing our collection. Last year, 8 students, working
10 hours a week databased our entire beetle collection. But this is
only the first step in a longer process; before we can make this data
available to the public or research communities, the more than 15,000
species names need to be checked for errors (both typographical and
nomenclatural). Once verified, they will be converted into a form that
will allow users to search through them easily via a web browser. We
currently expect that the entire collection will be inventoried, and
available for searching online, within 3-5 years; but until then,
please send us the names of organisms you are interested in and we will
use the age old 'data retreival' system known as 'human labor' to
search our holdings for your desired taxa.