Collections comprise different crustacea from the Southern Ocean, mostly Amphipoda. The bulk of the collections came from the Belgian Antarctic expeditions or Belgian participations in diverse Antarctic and sub-Antarctic campaigns in Queen Maud Land, the Weddell Sea, King George Island (South Shetland Islands), Kerguelen Islands and the Magellan region. They also include the first ever organisms collected on Antarctic bottoms by the historical Belgica Antarctic Expedition in 1897-1899. Important additional material was provided for study or depository by the specialists involved in the "Antarctic Amphipodologist Network" and by several national or international Antarctic programmes from Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, UK and US. Only about 200f the material is well studied and fully catalogued at the species level. The bulk of the material is sorted and catalogued to family level. Sorting, identification and digitization proceed. Ready usefulness of the collection was already shown for instance by some recent revision work on the family Stegocephalidae (Berge et al. 2000; Berge, in press a, b).