Revitalization of the recent invertebrates collection of the Sam Noble Museum

The Sam Noble Museum (SNM) is a non-profit, educational, and scientific organization that is the designated museum of natural history for the State of Oklahoma and an Organized Research Unit of the University of Oklahoma (OU). As part of a multi-phased long-term collections plan, revitalization efforts to date have focused on cataloging specimens and digitizing their associated information. In 2010, the department of Recent Invertebrates was awarded a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences to catalog and digitize at least 50% of the over 500,000 invertebrates specimens in the collection during a 3-year period (2010-2013), including most of the insects. One particularly important collection of insects for the museum is the collection of Byrrhoidea (an aquatic beetle superfamily), collected by Dr. Harley Brown. This collection contains perhaps the largest and most comprehensive collection of Byrrhoidea in the world, focused primarily on the Americas (Mexico and the United States) but includes representatives from over 60 countries. The collection contains >100 type specimens for new genera and species as well as many hundreds of paratypes. Approximately one-third of the collection was preserved as pinned material, the rest in vials of alcohol. Despite previous and cursory assessments of the specimens that initially suggested that they were threatened due to their being too crowded to investigate, or in discolored solutions or dried, respectively, the integrity of the collection is very good. We present our efforts in maintaining Dr. BrownÕs legacy of this large and significant collection with our cataloging, recuration, and preservation efforts.