The New York Times Agency May 2010

(NYT4) NEW YORK -- Jan. 11, 2003 -- MUSEUM-CATALOG -- The American Museum of Natural History has 2 million to 3 million fossils, and sooner or later descriptions of all of them will appear online, many with photographs. But the fossils are only a fraction of it. In all, the museum has 30 million items -- bird and animal skins, pickled frogs, pre-Columbian pots, diaries, field journals and sketches of explorers and scientists. So far, the museum has just scratched the surface of digitization, as the process is called, but the hope is to one day create a searchable online catalog of the whole museum, with images and text. Rick Edwards, a photographer at the American Museum of Natural History, capturing a protoceratops skull -- a dinosaur skull from the Gobi desert in Mongolia -- for the digital library in January 2003. (Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times)