UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Andy Deans is searching high and low for a 130-year-old insect. He knows it’s around here somewhere — but among the nearly 2 million insect specimens in the collection room of Penn State’s Frost Entomological Museum — the museum’s oldest specimen could be anywhere.
Aisles of mismatched wood shelves and metal cabinets fill the fluorescent-lit room from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Countless bugs — dragonflies, lice, aphids, moths, butterflies and bees — are hidden in drawers, slide boxes and even vintage cigar boxes.As the museum's new director, Deans has charged himself with the task of reinvigorating the museum’s public exhibitions and organizing the storage room to create more space for the University’s active and growing insect collection.
On this day, he’s focused on the darkling beetle, a bullet-shaped beetle captured in Bethlehem, Pa., that got moved recently as part of the museum’s revamp. “I have to dig it out from this cabinet,” said Deans, who is also an associate professor of entomology. “It’s from 1879, but looks like a recently pinned insect, except that the label has browned and faded.”
A 130-year-old beetle is not surprising for a collection of this size — insects preserved in a cool, dry environment can last for centuries. Though one of the biggest threats to these collections are actually other insects. Carpet beetles are famous for eating entire collections and leaving nothing but dust in their paths.
But, carpet beetle threats aside, Deans is on a mission to better preserve the University’s specimens and share them more broadly as well.
To help increase the visibility of the museum’s rare insect collections (including one of the top five aphid collections in North America) Deans is using ScholarSphere, an online repository tool developed at Penn State, to preserve digitized versions of the museum’s analog field notes, manuscripts, species descriptions, glass slides and more. Making this scientific material available in ScholarSphere will help Deans to more openly share the University’s rare collections with scientists at Penn State and other institutions.
Released last year, ScholarSphere was developed to help researchers comply with federal data sharing mandates and to support the long-term preservation of academic and research data at Penn State. The repository service enables University students, faculty and staff to curate, actively manage and share their materials — if they so choose — with the University community and the world.