Natural History Museum of LA County Puts Fish Collection Online

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has put their fish collection online at http://204.140.246.24/nhmims/pres/sHome.htm.

There are four ways you can search this collection -- there's a map, specific location field search, all location field search, and taxon field search.

Choosing the map search gives a popup window with a map (I couldn't get this feature to work in Opera but it worked in Mozilla.) You can pan the map back and forth, zoom in and out. After clicking the info icon (double-clicking) and then clicking on a spot on the map, yet another pop-up window will appear with information on various fish from that region. The map is a cute idea, but it's very hard and tedious to use on a dial up account.

Skip it and try one of the search walkthroughs instead. The specific location field search first prompts you to choose a field (state, county, river, etc.) The "Next" button is on the left, while "Cancel" is on the right. Anyone care to guess how many times I accidentally clicked cancel? Anyway, you'll get a list of values based on the field you chose. Choose a value and you'll be given the option to limit your search to a particular taxon. Finally you'll get a column of results that includes genus, species, country, and catalog number. Click on the "detail" icon and you'll get a popup window with more results, including field number, collection date, and the name of the collector.

The specific taxon field works similarly, but the all location fields keyword search is a more traditional keyword query box, though it gives the same columns of results.

Skip the map and use the search walkthroughs, and this is worth a look. Keep an eye on it, too -- the museum plans to add its amphibian and reptile collections to the site as well, which would increase the size of the database by almost 145,000 records.

Posted to Science-Zoology