Many visitors of the Academy of Natural Sciences experience the towering skeletons in Dinosaur Hall, the carefully curated wildlife dioramas and the groundbreaking exhibitions of the museum. But behind the scenes, there are vast rooms filled with carefully managed and preserved collections that began long before the museum existed. In fact, there are more than 19 million specimens in the Academy's collections, making it one of the most important natural sciences collections in the world, documenting life on Earth across continents, ecosystems and centuries.

The collections also contain more than 73,000 type specimens—the specimen that defines a species. The collections are used in important research and educational endeavors. Now, the Academy has a new centralized research website for anyone interested in seeing the details of its collections.

“It is the evolution of everything the research folks at the Academy have been doing on the web for the past 25 years. It consolidates research platforms in a way that unifies Academy collections and provides consistent, modern and exciting access to our data,” said Joseph Resnick, Executive Director of Technology and Infrastructure at the Academy.

Online visitors can navigate the different Academy collections and see descriptions, contact information for the collection managers, links to websites and aggregators where the collections are detailed. The link at the top of the page allows you to search the entire Academy collection.

“Try searching for your hometown,” Resnick said. “You can see ALL the specimens across ALL the collections that were collected there over the decades (centuries). It is a way to tell a story that we have not been able to tell before.”

Giving the public a tool to browse the Academy’s collections allows for researchers to access important details, for scientists around the world to see digitized versions of specimens and learn from them and for curious nature lovers to get an inside look of how natural history collections are itemized, digitized and catalogued. The website is an opportunity to admire the vastness and variety of the natural world and how it is studied.

“Each collection is unique,” Resnick said. “Whether you are considering the importance and history of things like the Entomology Spindex (to navigate collection cases and drawers) or the Diatom New Taxon File (started by Dr. Patrick in the 1950’s), it is often the uniqueness of each collection that tells the most interesting stories.”