Retrieving history: the liquid-preserved collection of the Museu do Mar – Rei D. Carlos

Abstract

The Museu do Mar – Rei D. Carlos (MMRDC) collection started in 1975 with a donation from a private collection of marine specimens to the municipality of Cascais. Over the years, this grew into a diverse and valuable collection of natural history. However, the lack of specialized human resources resulted in mistreatment of the liquid-preserved specimens. In 2022, a project was launched to catalogue and digitize the data from the liquid preserved specimens to inventory and to study it further. A systematic process was initiated to identify damaged specimens, examine associated information, and record storage errors. The damaged specimens were treated, making it possible to recover and retrieve information from 442 jars, totalling 1512 specimens from over 110 species. The development of projects as these are essential to increase knowledge about collections and to make them available to the scientific community, a necessary step for making these natural history collections tools for the future.

Keywords

• conservation
• Museu do Mar – Rei D. Carlos
• museum collection inventory
• digitization
• natural history collection