I came accross this research tool that will search a distributed database of catalogued scientific speciman collections. It generally deals with US, Canadian, Mexican, Austrailian and a few other collections of fish from around the world. It gives a lot of info like:
Institution, Collection, Catalog number text, Date last modified, Scientific name, Decimal latitude, Decimal longitude, Coordinate uncertainty in meters, Horizontal datum, Country, State/Province, County, Island, Island group, Locality, Verbatim elevation, Year collected, Collector, Georeferencing method, Lat/Long comments, Related Information, and Basis of record.
It runs a bit rough...

http://www.fishnet2.net/index.html

Coolness,

This actually reminds me, has anyone here thought about contributing to EOL (encyclopedia of life)? Great work in the making


http://www.eol.org/content/partners