Each museum artifact is presented on its own webpage, analogous to a page in a published exhibition catalog. Each webpage provides relevant data depending on the nature of the artifact, so for instance, natural history specimens have fields for the common and scientific names, and artworks have fields for dimensions, medium, and provenance. The data fields are:

•           Heading: presents the name of the museum artifact, usually as given in the primary source

•           Object Status: either Extant or Unlocated

•           Repository (if extant)

•           Date of Acquisition: represents the date as accurately as that can be determined. In the case of the Peale Museum, it could be the date the artifact is recorded in the Accessions Book (not necessarily the actual date of acquisition), or the date of a newspaper issue carrying a notice of donations that had come in at some unspecified time in the recent past, or the date a portrait is first mentioned in a letter as having been completed. The dates should therefore not be assumed to be precise. In the case of Du Simitière’s museum, most of the dates derive from notations in his Memorandum Books, which generally specify the year, often the month, but almost never the day, and many mentions of artifacts are completely undated (shown as “N.d.”). Du Simitière’s museum opened in 1782, but as early as 1765 he was documenting the acquisition of materials for his collection; we have considered all such acquisitions to be museum contents.

•           Date of Object: the date of object creation, if it can be ascertained

•           Additional Source Text: within quotation marks, any text provided by the primary source beyond the words in the Heading; any additional information about the artifact provided by any other contemporaneous (primary) source is presented in a following paragraph

•           Primary Source Reference: the source that documents that the artifact was once in one of the museums and that usually provides the wording of the heading

•           Donor: the source of the acquisition, if stated in a primary source

•           Category: this designation corresponds to the taxonomy that has been established to describe the museums’ contents; website viewers will be able to sort the contents of one or both of the museums by these categories in order to see, for example, all the Indigenous artifacts, or all the bird species, or all the portraits

•           Geographic Origin: the contents of one or both museums can also be sorted by place of origin, if it is specified or can be ascertained. Regarding the sub-divisions of North America: East refers to the area east of the Mississippi River, including the South; West and Northwest refers to the area west of the Mississippi River, and includes Mexico.

•           Notes: editorial commentary about the museum artifact; biographical information about the donor; references to and/or extracts from relevant primary and secondary literature

For natural history specimens:

•           Specimen Type: unless a natural history specimen is described as alive or living at the time it was acquired, it is presumed to have been dead/preserved

•           Peale's (or Du Simitière’s) Common name: self-explanatory; if the name is given by someone else (e.g., the author of a scientific paper based on a specimen in the museum), that person's name is given in parentheses.

•           Peale's (or Du Simitière’s) Scientific name: self-explanatory; if the name is given by someone else (e.g., the author of a scientific paper based on a specimen in the museum), that person's name is given in parentheses.

•           Current Common name: self-explanatory

•           Current Scientific name: self-explanatory

For works of art:

•           Artist

•           Medium

•           Dimensions

•           Provenance

For published works:

•           Author

•           Title Information

•           Imprint Information

Regarding the images:

This website is illustrated in order to simulate to the greatest extent possible the experience of visiting these museums. Given the impossibility of illustrating the great majority of the items once actually in the museums, we have opted to illustrate as many entries as possible with surrogate images that must stand in for those missing original artifacts.

Virtually all images have source information and most also have links to websites where the image and often much more information can be found. Hovering the cursor over the words "Image information" to the left of the image will bring up the information and link. These links often bring up a higher resolution image than what appears on this website. If the image appears too small, one can generally right-click on the image and open it in a new tab, where it can be enlarged.

Illustrating the website to the extent that we have been able would not have been possible without the existence of vast numbers of images freely available on the Internet. Projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Internet Archive, and the Hathi Trust Digital Library have at great expense made thousands of published works freely accessible and word-searchable. Collecting institutions such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museums, the Getty Research Institute, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have also digitized much of their holdings and made them freely accessible. Wikipedia has also been the source of a great many images. In other cases we have captured images from the Internet and have incorporated them into the website under the principle of fair use (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), given the educational and non-commercial nature of this website.