Milwaukee Public Museum

The Milwaukee Public Museum will partner with the Field Museum and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Greene Geological Museum to convert 60,000 paper�based Ordovician and Silurian fossil collection catalog records to digital form, generating more than 50,000 images. Data entry technicians will be hired to work directly with the collections at each institution, and receive training in the museum's collections management system? working with museum specimens? photography? Ordovician paleontology? and geology. The cooperative effort will create an online database with location, stratigraphic data, systematic data, and selected photographs of fossils that chronicle the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event and the Ordovician Mass Extinction. The database will make the collections discoverable to researchers, teachers, and students. The general public will be encouraged to use the database and companion website to learn more about the diversification of animal life on Earth and a major extinction event.