All posts tagged with clir

The American Museum of Natural History selected two unique sets of material to digitize for the CLIR BHL Field Notes Project: field books from the Whitney South Sea Expedition and the Archbold Expeditions. These were two long-running undertakings to systematically explore and collect the flora and fauna of Oceania. Both contributed invaluable specimens to the scientific research and exhibition collections at AMNH. We recently completed digitization of the Whitney South Sea Expedition field notes and are thrilled to have commenced work on the Archbold material. Arguably, the most rewarding aspect of participating in this project is raising awareness of some rather remarkable individuals and expeditions. One example is the 2nd Archbold Expedition to New Guinea.

For two days in April, a group of librarians, archivists, developers and other members of the digital library community came together in Chicago for DPLAfest, an annual conference organized by the Digital Public Library of America. Focuses of this year’s conference included collaboration across institutions, public engagement, social justice, metadata quality, and the use and reuse of open access content. The BHL has been a content hub for DPLA since its launch in 2013, and we were excited to participate in this year’s conference.

The Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG), a partner in the Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project, has spent the last year digitizing the notebooks of George Engelmann. George Engelmann assisted Henry Shaw, MBG’s founder, in establishing the Garden’s research arm and corresponding library. He arrived in Belleville, Illinois, sometime in the 1830s but soon moved to St. Louis where he set up practice as a physician.

As a part of the Field Notes Project, the Ernst Mayr Library is digitizing the journals, correspondences and photographs of William Brewster (1851-1919), a self-trained ornithologist and specimen curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a co-founder and president of the American Ornithologists’ Union.  Brewster recorded a lifetime of observations on wildlife and plants, changing landscapes, and daily weather, making his notes a valuable resource for modern scientists studying ecological change.

At Internet Archive, we are excited to provide digitization services for BHL Field Notes Project contributors from coast to coast. We will be digitizing our partners’ selected field notebooks at two of our eight North American regional digitization centers: San Francisco, CA and Princeton, NJ and providing remote services for the American Museum of Natural History.

At regional centers, Internet Archive operators upload metadata from contributing partners, capture high-quality digital images using our Scribe system, then review each image for completeness and add structural metadata as appropriate.