Computerizing natural history collections

Computers are ubiquitous in the life sciences and are associated with many of the practical and conceptual changes that characterize biology's twentieth-century transformation. Yet comparatively little has been written about how scientists use computers. Despite this relative lack of scholarly attention, the claim that computers revolutionized the life sciences by making the impossible possible is widespread, and relatively unchallenged. How did the introduction of computers into research programs shape scientific practice? The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, Berkeley provides a tractable way into this under-examined question because it is possible to follow the computerization of data in the context of long-term research programs.