Mollusks represent the second largest phylum in the animal kingdom, one that contains extraordinary ecological diversity, spanning terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments, and has a fossil record dating back to the Cambrian. Formally and permanently accessioned mollusks in institutional collections constitute a rich library of morphological and genetic diversity and provide baseline data of the group's distribution in time and space. As such, they contribute to an enormous range of research fields, from evolutionary history of life forms, to the occurrence and abundance and management needs of species, shifting of distribution ranges (including fisheries and pest species), and changing attributes (e.g. body size) over time. High quality molluscan specimen data contained in natural history collections provide a foundation for environmental monitoring of all human-impacted habitats.

The ecological and economic importance of North American specimen collections can only be fully assessed and harnessed if the data are accessible in meaningful and comparable ways. Traditionally, taxon-specific publications have reported on the scope of individual museum collections or type material (e.g. Bieler and Bradford 1991) and that practice continues today across taxa (e.g. Ciubuc 2017). Individual publications are an important way to annotate collections and holdings, but inefficient for providing wide access to collections' information. Ariño (2010) estimated 3% of the possible 2.1 billion natural history collection lots of all taxa were available through GBIF. GBIF (accessed in June 2018) lists 156,000,000 specimen records (11 million of which are mollusks), so the figure has grown to perhaps 8%, but clearly there is still far to go in digitizing collections. Having a realistic sense of the scope of collections is essential to planning for efficient digitization, data and specimen management, and to promote data and specimen usage. Digitizing metadata about collections may be a global first step (Berendsohn and Seltmann 2010, Scoble 2010, Schindel et al. 2016), but local collections must publish their holdings as quickly as time and resources allow.

The curators and collections managers responsible for mollusk collections have made several significant attempts to understand and document the size and scope of their holdings. In response to the Association of Systematics Collection's National Plan (Irwin et al. 1973), Field Museum curator Alan Solem published a seminal work on the state of the U.S. and Canadian mollusk collections (Solem 1975). He surveyed 125 institutions and 100 private collectors and provided a synopsis of the data from 45 mollusk collections and 50 collectors from the U.S. and Canada. Nineteen mollusk collections with fewer than 5,000 lots were excluded from his analysis. He calculated that 78% of all molluscan holdings were contained within eight institutions and argued that supporting these collections would have the maximum benefit to molluscan research. Since then, additional compilations of institutions with type specimens (Kabat and Boss 1992, 1997) or important holdings (Sturm 2006) have been published, and an extensive list of worldwide mollusk collections with contact information and summary collections data has been maintained online by Cummings et al. (last updated 2009). An additional comprehensive resource was provided by Coan and Kabat (2018), who compiled biographical and bibliographical publications for more than 10,000 malacologists and other individuals with an interest in and relevant contributions to mollusks' natural history and distribution. However, there has not been another comprehensive survey of mollusk collection holdings and their scope in over 40 years.

Collection management of natural history collections has changed fundamentally over the past decades, incorporating advances in archival storage materials and techniques, digitization of text data and images, and global gathering and sharing of specimen and metadata information via the Internet. The rapid development and adoption of such approaches in mollusk collections is demonstrated in the “Standards for Malacological Collections,” developed and published by Solem et al. (1981) for the North American Council of Systematic Malacologists. Focus therein was on the physical well-being of the collections (proper storage of material for future morphological study) and the local availability of specimen and collecting event data.

Online accessibility of specimen records now allows harvesting locality data that can be used in a growing and everdeveloping range of research fields, such as biogeography, species range shifts, niche modeling, environmental monitoring, and conservation research, as well as documenting spatial, temporal, and taxonomic collecting gaps. Such data mining is greatly enhanced by data aggregators (e.g. GBIF) and unified collection portals, such as iDigBio (idigbio.org), InvertEBase (invertebase.org), and SCAN (scan-bugs.org). Increasing data quality (e.g. through improved georeferencing), data scope (e.g. by adding 2D and 3D images), and specimen attributes (e.g. documenting host-parasite associations) forms the foundation of a new range of specimen-based research activities (e.g. see Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference series, organized by iDigBio).

Here, we report on the results of a new survey of United States and Canadian mollusk collections that was conceived and initiated prior to the Molluscan Digitization Workshop at the 2017 American Malacological Society meeting (Shea et al. 2018, this volume). This survey revisited some of the same questions that Solem (1975) addressed and investigated new issues including georeferencing and moving collections data onto the web. Importantly, this survey also focused on finding and including smaller, lesser-known, and “hidden” collections to get a more complete understanding of the scope of molluscan holdings in the United States and Canada (documented in Appendix 2). The institutions surveyed are listed in Table 1. The results provide new insights into the complex landscape of natural history holdings and will help prioritize and maximize limited resources to improve the care of, access to, and research use of mollusk collections.

BACKGROUND ON MOLLUSK COLLECTIONS

The structure and nature of molluscan (malacological) collections reflect the specific physical attributes of the phylum Mollusca, the species-richness (Table 2) and unique characteristics of each included group, their collection-forming history, the advancement of preservation techniques (Appendix 4), and the ever-increasing research use and research techniques applied to these collections. Perhaps more so than most other groups of organisms in collections, mollusk collections have a history of contributions by amateur collectors. In addition to major collecting efforts by researchers and government agencies, Solem (1975:223) estimated that 85% of the mollusks in major institutional collections were collected by amateurs. These specimens often were (and are) of very high quality and with good locality data but may be biased towards large and attractive shells. In addition, such material from private collections consists predominantly of dry shells, without tissues suitable for anatomical and molecular study. An outstanding example of a private collection absorbed by a U.S. museum is Leslie Hubricht's collection of about 500,000 specimens in 43,000 lots of eastern U.S. land snails that forms the backbone of FMNH’s North American land snail collection (Solem 1986, Gerber 2010). Molluscan collections cover a wide range of specimen sizes, from microscopic snails to giant squid, and preservation types including dry shells, fluid preserved bodies, fossil material, and other derivative materials, e.g. dissected specimens and histological preparations on microscope slides. With increasing focus toward modern research applications, the diversity of preservation techniques and concomitant storage needs have evolved since the 1970s to include cryogenic facilities and electron microscopy mounts.

Table 1.

Surveyed mollusk collections — List of U.S. and Canadian mollusk collections, in alphabetical order of museum or collection identifier. All contacted collections are listed. Museum identifiers are those the institutions currently prefer and may differ from acronyms or identifiers used in other listings. Column 1975 shows collections surveyed by Solem (1975). Column 1996/2009: indicates collections included in Cummings et al. 2009 (latest partial updates are from 2009). Museum identifiers used by Solem and Cummings et al. 2009, if different from this list, are given in the respective columns. Column 2017: shows the current survey. Notations:^ENA = data limited to eastern North America; LD = limited data provided (these collections are included in subsequent tables and appendices only when sufficient data are available); NC = no mollusk collection present; [F] = indicates fossil holdings; [R] indicates Recent holdings in largely paleontological mollusk collections.

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Table 2.

Average number of lots per molluscan species by class. The number of lots held for each class is divided by the number of species in that classes as a reflection of taxonomic coverage across the surveyed collections. Data on number of marine species is from MolluscaBase; data on non-marine is from Rosenberg (2014) updated with recently described species from MolluscaBase.

SURVEY PROCEDURE

A survey questionnaire (see Appendix 1) was distributed (by RB) in March 2017 as a Microsoft Excel worksheet to 80 known or expected institutional collections of extant mollusks in the U.S. and Canada. We targeted collections listed by Solem (1975), those identified in Kabat and Boss (1992, 1997) as having molluscan type holdings, and those in the online listing by Cummings et al. (2009). The survey focused on extant holdings of formal institutional collections; exclusively paleontological collections or private collections were not included. After the initial survey, some additional collections came to our attention and were sent the survey individually. For some of these mostly smaller collections, data were collected and added as late as June 2018. In total, 60 (70%) of the 88 collections contacted provided full or partial data (Table 1); 27 collections provided limited data, and one collection (Marshall University) has been closed (V. Fet in lit.).

Intensive efforts were made to obtain comparable data for collection sizes measured in cataloged lots, digitized lots, and quality backlog. We often sent follow up questions to individual respondents to clarify ambiguities, such as reporting specimen numbers rather than lot numbers or accession numbers rather than cataloged lots; including backlog in estimates of proportion of holdings by taxonomy, geography, habitat or preservation; or providing such proportions only for digitized parts of the collection rather than for all cataloged lots. Some data in the Tables and Appendices are supplemented from other sources, especially from Cummings et al. (2009), and institutional websites. Nonetheless, some inconsistencies remain across the figures reported in the tables and are flagged with superscripts in Appendices 3-10.

Although we made every effort to find and include all known mollusk collections in the United States, we have undoubtedly missed some collections, misinterpreted some freestyle responses, and were not able to obtain detailed records from some collections in time for this analysis. We hope that we will be able to include these additional, under-documented, or undiscovered collections in future treatments.

RESULTS

Preservation

Across institutions, there were 4,677,000 cataloged dry lots and about 742,000 wet lots (Appendix 4), the total of which (5,420,000) is 771,000 lots less than the total cataloged lots reported. This difference is partly because some institutions, generally those with fewer than 40,000 lots, did not report dry versus wet lots, and partly because some institutions reported numbers only for digitized material, rather than from the whole collection. Assuming that institutions that did not report wet holding have essentially entirely dry collections, 194,000 should be added to the total for dry lots, which means that about 13% of lots are fluid preserved. Backlog was more than 90% dry preserved, 1,130,000 versus 106,000 lots (Appendix 4), but only 53% of the total backlog of 2.3 million is accounted for in this figure.

Table 3.

Comparison of mollusk collection sizes – Categories are a combination of the Large, Medium, Small, and Very Small sizes presented in Solem (1975) plus a new, Medium-Large category based on 2017 data. ¹In Solem (1975), the Small category ranged from 9,000 (EKY) - 27,700 (ChM), but it was expanded to 9,000–29,000 to exclude gaps between collection categories. ²Only 8 collections are listed here because the SU collection was transferred to CAS.

Only 14 institutions reported frozen holdings (tissues and whole animals), and only one (UCMP) included frozen lots in its count of cataloged lots. Frozen lots (cataloged and backlog, not counting DNA extracts) total about 15,000 (Appendix 4) and so less than 0.3% of holdings. Other holdings included slides (radular and histology), SEM stubs, egg masses, hosts and parasites, DNA extracts, and images (Appendix 4).

Mollusk Collections in the U.S. and Canada in 2017

In the United States, collections included herein were from 37 states, the District of Columbia, and the Territory of Puerto Rico; Canada was represented by five collections in four provinces (Figure 1 – Map). Collections are concentrated along both coasts of North America, with five of the ten largest in the Boston-Washington corridor of the east coast, two in the Midwest, and one each in Florida, California, and Hawaii. States with the largest populations have multiple collections (e.g. California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Texas); whereas large parts of the central and northwestern United States do not have any identified mollusk collections.

Mollusk collections are maintained by a wide variety of institutions and were developed for a similarly wide variety of reasons. Collections are developed, acquired, and grown due to research, educational, avocational, or monitoring activities that are part of the overall mission of the institution. The largest mollusk collections in the U.S. and in Canada are both federally funded. Their collections are geographically global in scope, although North American materials dominate (Table 3 – Collection Size Categories, Appendices 9, 10). Many of the largest mollusk collections (>160,000 lots) are “private” museums, which, in the U.S., are tax-exempt, not-for-profit, 501c3 institutions (e.g. AMNH, DMNH, FMNH). The formal reports on 990 tax forms ( https://irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-990) show a wide variety in what it means to be “private,” including public-private partnerships. Large collections are also found at university-affiliated and supported museums (e.g. ANSP at Drexel University, MCZ at Harvard University, OSUM at Ohio State University, UF at the University of Florida), many of which have a long history of mollusk-centered research. In contrast, smaller collections are often found at institutions with a regional audience or research focus. For example, the Natural History Society of Maryland in Baltimore has a land snail collection, and state wildlife agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Tampa or the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission maintain specimen collections as a result of their mission to understand and manage local wildlife.

In addition to full-time, permanent collection staff, survey respondents included emeritus faculty, graduate students, and volunteers. The wide range of individuals who answered the survey is both a testament to the depths of dedication to the care of these important collections, and simultaneously a sign of an ongoing staffing crisis.

The number and kind of collection-related staff positions reported were highly variable (Table 4). In larger collections, there was generally one or more senior research biologists with a mollusk-specific research interest plus administrative responsibilities for the collection (e.g. strategic oversight, growth, funding) plus one or more collection professionals with day-to-day operational responsibility for managing and caring for the collection. Job titles for the research/administrator position vary from Curator to Professor to Research Biologist, and often this person has significant additional responsibilities elsewhere such as teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. In smaller collections, this senior position may be held by a volunteer. In larger collections, operations staff may be a full or part-time Collection Manager, Collection Assistant, data entry specialist, archivist, or someone completely outside the collections' community (e.g. an aquarist). Especially at some of the larger university-supported institutions, Collection Managers often have advanced degrees, some with PhDs, and are expected to participate in grant writing and collection-based research (e.g. UMMZ).

Figure 1.

Distribution of surveyed molluscan collections in North America (note that two collections, in Alaska and Hawaii, are outside the map area). Green/asterisk flags mark collections that rank among the 10 largest by number of cataloged lots; yellow/diamond flags mark collections with at least 1,000 verified research-quality specimen lots of extant mollusks; smaller blue flags mark collections with smaller such holdings or for which only limited data could be obtained during the survey. Map data ©2018 Google, Image Landsat/Copernicus, Data SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, NSF, GEBCO, US Dept of State Geographer.

Collection operations staff may be generalized and pooled across disciplines so that a few people are responsible for multiple extant and paleontological invertebrate collections. In these scenarios, it is not uncommon for collections to be without relevant molluscan curatorial expertise, sometimes for many years (e.g. AMNH, DMNH-P, SDNH, UNSM). Our data demonstrate that collections exposed to prolonged periods without dedicated staff with expertise in the field become increasing inaccessible and lag in technological and digital data management advances (see Table 1, collections indicated by LD provided only limited data in our survey and also Appendix 3; collections such as CMC and UAZ reporting little or no change of their collection data between 1975 and 2017).

DISCUSSION

Collection staffers are routinely asked the deceptively simple question – how big is your collection? Most collections have settled on a standard answer to this question that is both defensible and approximately correct using available tools. As digitization continues, collections will be able to report on their size and scope with increasing rigor and nuance. However, nationwide, collections are mid-way through this transition and are grappling individually with challenges of rapid technological changes, enormous workloads and backlogs, all contained within an environment of declining resources and reduction in staffing (Table 4).

Table 4.

Mollusk Collection Metadata – Collection management metadata about mollusk collections with >85K cataloged in 2017. Abbreviations: staffing c = curator, which includes the senior administrative staff responsible for research and oversight of the collection; staffing s = staff which includes operational staff volunteers, and students responsible for the day to day activities within the collection; ¹Curators, Collection Managers and Collections Assistants are counted as 1 FTE Full-time) or 0.5 FTE (part-time, or emeritus). Volunteers or casual to part time employees are counted as 0.2 FTE per day of volunteering.

Figure 2.

Large mollusk collections. The 1955 data are from Table 4 in Solem (1975).

Overall, we estimate that in 2017 there are at least 100 million mollusks in 8.5 million lots held by about 90 mollusk collections across the U.S. and Canada. The Smithsonian's Natural History Museum has the single largest cataloged collection in North America with more than 1 million cataloged lots; however, there are also > 20 mollusk collections with between 1,000 – 8,000 cataloged mollusk lots and > 20 mollusk collections with between 9,000 – 30,000 lots (Appendix 3). Some of the smaller collections have important regional and taxonomic holdings. For example, SIO-PIC has the fourth largest cephalopod collection, and RBCM has the sixth largest chiton collection among surveyed institutions (Appendix 5). The number of specimens per lot reported in collections varies widely, from 1 to 35, depending on the focus of an institution. OGL is a collection of DNA extracts from frozen tissues wherein every extract is a specimen. UNM is a parasite collection, with individual mollusks preserved as the source of parasites, so it also has a 1:1 ratio of specimens to lots. Brazosport has a synoptic display collection, usually with only one specimen per lot. On the other end of the scale, institutions that have largely expedition and survey material tend to have larger number of specimens per lot.

Figure 3.

Mid-sized plus mollusk collections. This category is defined as having 85,000 - 120,000 cataloged lots and did not exist in Solem (1975).

U.S. and Canadian collections hold about 101,000 type lots (Appendix 3), but the actual number of taxon names typified by these is unknown (e.g. multiple institutions may hold syntype lots for a single nominal species). The number of names typified can eventually be determined once most collections are represented in online portals such as GBIF and iDigBio. Unrecognized type material might also be found through these portals, by searching for specimens collected, donated, or formerly owned by the authors of taxa. Images of primary type specimens collected through these general natural history portals, and taxon-specific ones such as MolluscaBase, will be an enormous resource for the scientific community, as they are the standards for authoritative identification.

Type specimens represent less than 2% of the holdings of the surveyed institutions, and so present an obvious, achievable target for digitization and imaging efforts. However, mobilizing data on a much larger scale is needed to understand changes in distribution patterns of species over time. Across the surveyed collections, 73% of cataloged material is digitized in the broadest sense (Appendix 8), but when quality backlog material is included, this drops below 53%.

Figure 4.

A snapshot of curation status in large and mid-sized plus collections. All data from the 2017 survey. Backlog numbers are estimates of quality backlog.

Computerization or digitization of collections, then referred to as electronic data processing (EDP), was in its infancy when Solem prepared his 1975 report, which was preparatory to large scale efforts to digitize mollusk collections. Digitization of 4.5 million molluscan lots since then is an impressive achievement, but, including backlog, 4 million more already in collections remain to be digitized, in addition to new acquisitions resulting from ongoing field collecting, donations of collections from private individuals, and acceptance of orphaned collections from other institutions (e.g. universities that reduce their organismal research programs).

The greatest need for digitization in mollusks collections is probably georeferencing, which is essential for mapping and visualizing distributions of species. Only 25% of digitized mollusk lots and only 18% of cataloged lots are georeferenced (Appendix 8), which means that most institutions are not yet in position to automate sharing of their spatial data through standard portals. Our survey asked only if coordinate data were available, not whether the georeferencing met modern standards. For example, fields for source of coordinates, and error radius (Shea et al. 2018), which are currently part of Darwin Core (see at:  http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/, Biodiversity Information Standards TDWG) were not initially part of the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012). Only 20 collections claimed that all their records were fully Darwin Core compliant, but 66 collections reported having some level of digitization. Of these, 34 have their data online through searchable databases. This suggests that more than 20 collections have databases that are compliant.

Our survey asked for the number of records captured with skeleton data (minimal or incomplete label data, e.g. only identification and country) or with fields not standardized, versus records that were Darwin Core compliant (Appendix 1, question 5), but at least one institution replied that all of its records were skeleton data only, but that all were Darwin Core compliant. This is technically correct—the database is compliant, and the data that are present are compliant, but a large amount of data remain to be input or retrofitted. Clearly, the responses to this part of our survey were heterogeneous.

Solem (1975) emphasized that mollusk collections are exceeded in number of specimens only by entomological collections. Several other collection communities produced surveys similar to Solem's in the 1970s, from which he noted 120 million insects, 72 million mollusks, and 46 million plants. The U.S. National Herbarium currently reports that its 5 million specimens represent about 8% of the holdings in the United States, implying that there are about 63 million total specimens ( http://botany.si.edu/colls/collections_overview.htm), so the relative rankings of insects, mollusks and plants are unchanged since the 1970s.

Solem also estimated that mollusks, with about 850 specimens per species across the surveyed collections were second only to fish, with about 1,750 collection specimens per species in U.S. and Canadian collections. These high numbers of specimens available per species for study and comparison make these two groups extremely well-suited to environmental monitoring, allowing measurement of attribute changes (e.g. body size) through space and time. No other taxon group passed 500 specimens per species in the nation’s collections (Solem 1975: 231). Since Solem's time, the estimated number of described mollusk species have declined from 85,000 to about 78,800 (Table 2), whereas the number of fish species has increased from the 20,000 Solem used for calculations to 34,852 (Eschmeyer and Fong 2018). We found an average of 108 lots per species for mollusks (Table 2), or about 1,100 specimens per species, using the weighted average of 10.5 specimens per lot (Appendix 3). This is almost 10 times what Solem reported for insects, 120 specimens per species, a figure that is probably high, given the explosive increase in estimates for diversity of insects since that time (Stork et al. 2015).

Figure 5.

Software applications used to manage mollusk collection data in the U.S. and Canada in 2017.

The estimate of 1,100 specimens per species might also be considered high, since mollusk collections contain undescribed species and unidentified specimens. Many mollusks species are rare, however, being known only from the type locality, and so may not even be present in North American collections. We expect that many common species will be represented by hundreds of samples and thousands of specimens that will allow construction of time series for studying changes in distribution patterns.

The pattern of lots per species among the molluscan classes in U.S. and Canadian collections is interesting. (We switch here to using lots rather than specimens per species since it is not clear that the average number of specimens per lot will be the same across classes and our survey data do not allow us to calculate it). Bivalves (230 lots per species) and cephalopods (128 lots per species) have the highest values, which perhaps reflects that some species have high enough abundance that they can sustain fisheries, but they are collected with different methods, since virtually all bivalves are benthic whereas many cephalopods are pelagic. Gastropods and chitons have similar, intermediate values, 91 and 82 lots per species, which is probably coincidental since gastropods occupy terrestrial and freshwater habitats in addition to the marine habitat of chitons. Scaphopods are somewhat lower at 65 lots per species, which might reflect their exclusively infaunal habitat. Aplacophorans are undersampled relative to other mollusks at 19 lots per species, reflecting that they lack shells and therefore are not collected post-mortem like shell-bearing mollusks; also, their small worm-like bodies may not be recognized as molluscan by the non-specialist. If the average value of specimens per lot (10.5, Table 3) is applied across the molluscan classes, the aplacophorans end up in Solem's “low” category for specimens per species, whereas the bivalves have the highest value, at 2,400 specimens per species, which suggests that bivalves are one of the best sampled classes of metazoans. Only among microorganisms such as diatoms might higher number of specimens per species be expected in natural history collections.

Fish collections have grown more rapidly than mollusk collections, increasing from 35 million to 64 million specimens by the early 1990s (Poss and Collette 1995). Much of this growth however has been in larval fish, which are difficult to identify by morphological means (Ko et al. 2013). Also, unlike mollusk collections, where all the large collections reported an increased number of lots between Solem's 1975 survey and our 2017 survey, some fish collections show a decrease in number of lots from 1995 to today, judging from collection websites (LACM, 7 million to 4 million; CAS: 2.16 million to 1.2 million; USNM, 5 million to 4 million, MPM, 1.5 million to 685,000). It is therefore difficult to judge whether mollusk or fish collections have more material per species that is relevant for assessing environmental change. What is more important is the similarity of fish and mollusk collections in being lot based, which means they can be more rapidly and effectively digitized than taxa in which cataloguing and labelling is individual based. A single lot in a mollusk or fish collection can contain hundreds of specimens, which allows studies of environmentally mediated change in morphological and genetic variation over time, in addition to changes in distribution patterns.

Over the past 15 years, the value of natural history collections (National Science and Technology Council 2009), their use in formal and informal education (Cook et al. 2014, Ellwood et al. 2015, Hiller et al. 2017), and their increased use in research due to digitization efforts has been the subject of much discussion. There are many challenges to digitization that still must be addressed, including a need for coordination of activities across all natural history collections, and means of finding efficiencies in similar tasks (Vollmar et al. 2010).

The scope of the challenge is staggering, and global efforts to consider the best approach have focused on digitizing metadata from all collections across the world as a starting point (Berendsohn and Seltmann 2010, Scoble 2010, Page et al. 2015). As part of the U.S. response to this enormous task, the National Science Foundation Program “Advancing Digitization in Biological Collections” has been funding digitization and web-publishing of data in non-federal collections since 2011. The iDigBio program (Integrated Digitized Biocollections), headquartered at the Florida Museum of Natural History and currently supported by NSF, has become an important collaborator and coordinator of collections information and resources for collections trying to improve their digitization efforts.

Sustained funding and coordinated collaboration have brought millions of new specimen records online, and natural history collections are slowly being recognized as the important source of biodiversity data that they are; however, the usefulness of natural history collections in the 21^st century is directly tied to their availability online and the ability of researchers to use those data quickly and with confidence. The rate at which mollusk collection data are annotated, contextualized with provenance data, and published online needs to be accelerated. Planning for this challenge requires an understanding of the amount of data available and its state of preparedness for digitizing.