The UBC-BBM Fish Collection (University of British Columbia, Beaty Biodiversity Museum, UBFC), was begun by Dr. C. McLean Fraser in the Department of Zoology in the 1910s. It was officially created in 1945 when the cataloguing was started. It has been managed by different UBC institutes and departments until 2010 when the BBM was created. The computerization started in 1975. The oldest specimen was collected in 1903.
The collection may currently hold 26,000 lots with 300,000 specimens over the 33,700 lots with 346,000 specimens recorded in the database (inventory 2023). Almost 32,000 recorded lots are georeferenced, from about 5,700 different stations. Two-thirds of the recorded lots come from marine waters, but one third in terms of number of specimens. Besides fishes from British Columbia and adjacent Canada and USA’s states that are the location for 75% of the recorded lots, various expeditions in the Pacific and Asia in the 1950-60s increased the diversity to reach today about 2,800 recorded valid species, with recorded 11 holotypes and 209 paratypes for 38 nominal species. About 500 x-ray plates and 129 drawings are available at https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bbmnhibc.
For more details, see https://beatymuseum.ubc.ca/research-2/collections/fish-collection/.
The database was previously disseminated through FishBase since 1996 (temporarily, there may be duplicates in GBIF).