For many years the Mollusk Division has functioned as a state, national and international systematic facility. Like other museums, Mollusk Division personnel make identifications and lend specimens for study. The Division's status as a national and international facillty rests in part on the amount of such service, but still more on the nature and extent of its other cooperative activities. The following account, although condensed and incomplete, will give some idea of the scope of the services the Mollusk Division performs. Although in one sense given freely, these are directly or indirectly recompensated in many ways, in particular by additions to the collections and libraries.
(1) Collaboration with individual scientists. This is of various kinds, and given under various arrangements and circumstances. Much of it consists in identification of specimens, either for specialists who cannot themselves come to use the Museum's collections, or for workers in other fields. Among the latter in recent years have been anthropologists, parasitologists, physiologists, fisheries biologists and ecologists. Another important service to individual malacologists is the loan of specimens important to their studies.
The Mollusk Division also provides space, facilities, and sometimes financial support for zoologists who come to work with its collections, and over the years many investigators from other institutions have come to Ann Arbor to use the Division's facilities or collections. They come from various parts of the United States and from Canada, South America, Europe, the Near East, Africa, Southeast Asia, Russia, the Far East and Australia.
(2) Collaboration with state, federal and international agencies. The services performed by the Mollusk Division fall into the following categories:
(a) contributions to the knowledge of local, national and foreign faunas, by surveys, direct investigation, and publishing both technical and popular reports of its findings;
(b) direct participation in the work of other scientific and regulatory agencies, such as state and U.S. departments of agriculture, departments of conservation and natural resources, state and federal water quality agencies, state and national public health services, the Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Research and Development Agency, Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, Agency for International Development, World Health Organization, United Nations Development Program, etc. These activities include identification of specimens, providing consultation services, and participating in research and field surveys.
he malacological journals (each set complete), about 1,500 other volumes dealing specifically with mollusks, and many reprints. These are housed in a separate library room within the Mollusk Division area. Additionally, the general Museum library and the University's library storage facility houses nearly all existing journals on natural history (i.e., those not dealing specifically with mollusks, but which contain many malacological articles), and the Graduate, Undergraduate, Biological Sciences and Medical Libraries (all less than three blocks away from the Museums building) are outstanding in their coverage of all biological subjects.
