Worldwide, over 900 Field Stations & Marine Labs (FSMLs) provide critical physical infrastructure for immersive research in just about every possible type of environment. The place-based nature of FSMLs makes them natural repositories for continuous site-specific data, including biological specimens. In fact, biological collections are among the infrastructure that makes an individual station appealing to researchers and other visitors. We discuss common characteristics of biological collections held by FSMLs, as well as the unique research value of such collections, and the digitization progress made within this community. FSML collections are typically small in size and regional in scope. Because FSMLs function as interdisciplinary, multi-audience hubs, their collections serve diverse user groups and may experience simultaneously more access and less consistent curation than we expect of similarly-sized collections housed at museums and universities. We qualify these issues in the context of the research opportunity that digitization brings to FSML-based biological collections.