A.D. Pickett Entomology Museum

On July 28, 1984, the A.D. Pickett Entomological Museum and Research Laboratory was officially opened in the Department of Biology (presently Environmental Sciences). That day, Dr. Pickett was present to receive a memorial key and he humbly accepted that the College gave his name to its permanent entomological collection initiated several years ago by the efforts of many contributors. The Museum is currently housed in room C-112 of Cox Institute. This room is divided into two areas, the Museum proper (46 m2) and an adjacent well-equipped research laboratory (19 m2) that also serves as a preparation room.

The collection is stored in steel cabinets, each containing 24 Cornell drawers with pinning trays. In that room, by means of an interactive terminal, it was possible to access the College main-frame computer in which the entire collection is computerized using the VAX Datatrieve data base management system. The computerization of the collection was initiated in 1985 and completed in 1989. In the late 90's as the College information technology migrated from this mainframe environment to a LAN, it became crucial to identify a collection management software PC compatible and to translate our data base into it. To this end the Nova Scotia Museum developed software MIMS (Museum Information Management System), it was selected and the translation was effectuated. In 2004, MIMS underwent a major upgrade and consequently our collection was adapted to this recent more user friendly version. This provides for an excellent research and management tool. It enables the Curator to readily identify strengths and weaknesses and, therefore, to appropriately guide collecting endeavours. Our future plans are to further computerize the loan and exchange activities of the Museum.

The A.D. Pickett Entomological Museum consists of three separate collections: the main dry collection, a smaller teaching collection and a wet collection. The dry collection contains over 12,000 identified specimens, representing 1,485 species, covering the major insect orders of North America. Though the majority of insects were collected in the Maritime provinces, some of the specimens are from as far away as South America and Britain. Most of the specimens in this collection are pinned adults, preserved solely by air drying. The wet collection is an array of soft-bodied insects, and related invertebrates such as spiders and mites the more than 500 vials which make up this collection also contain various life stages and samples of pest damage preserved in 70% alcohol. The teaching collection is maintained for the sole purpose of laboratory instruction. It allows the students to become familiar with the major families of insects within the main orders. It also provides experience in proper handling of fragile pinned insects.

As it stands now, the dry collection comprises of over 12,000 computer records, each covering 39 different fields of information. The wet collection, to be expanded in the future, is only a nucleus. It comprises of over 500 computer records. It is interesting to note that the selection of the computer fields is in accordance to those currently used by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). .