The purpose of this site is to provide electronic access to the collections in the University's E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum, one of the most significant insect collections in Canada. The collection contains approximately one million specimens and is made up of two sub-collections, the Research Collection and the Alberta Reference Collection. The Research Collection includes principally Nearctic insects, representing most orders and their major families. The beetle family (Carabidae) is especially well represented: it includes about 400,000 specimens principally from the Nearctic region, but with an important Neotropical component. The Reference Collection contains a few (one or two) representative specimens of most of the species of butterflies, moths, beetles and caddisflies known from Alberta. This website is a searchable database. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
Amongst the major targets of the ZooSphere project are: An international repository and web hub for high resolution image sequences of biological specimen; Delivering content to various end user devices, such as dekstop computers, mobile devices and web browsers in general; Create a tool for scientists, especially taxonomists, to speed up and improve their research; Prevent physical object transfer via regular mail; Reduce travel costs and efforts related to local object inspection; Digital preservation of biological collection objects, which are subject to natural decay; Increasing the visibility and accesibility of biological collection objects; Making objects available to both: general public and scientists. The ZooSphere project is in a very early stage. Yet it already yields excellent results concerning the automatic high resolution image sequence capturing of biological collection objects. We preferably release all software and web components as early as possible, though they are still subject of frequent change. Thereby, we would like to gain early feedback and cooperations, to increase the efficiency of our work. You are welcome to send any feedback or suggestions via mail to: contact@zoosphere.net ... [Information of the supplier]