The Smithsonian Field Book Project is showcasing Frederick William True in February! This post is follows in a series of blogs and social media content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Pyenson Lab, Smithsonian Transcription Center, Smithsonian Archives, and Smithsonian Libraries celebrating #FWTrueLove. Click on these links to the first and second posts; the third one, below, is based on a seminar recently presented by John Ososky (OsteoPrep Lab, Department of Vertebrate Zoology, NMNH) and co-written with N. D. Pyenson.

Frederick William True. c. 1880s. Smithsonian Institution Archive. Negative Number 2002-32245. http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_10688.

In 1858, the inland port of Middletown, Connecticut, was the largest manufacturer of marine hardware in the United States, at a time when the shipping industry shifted from sails to steam. Frederick W. True was born that year, and unsurprisingly developed a lifelong interest in ships and fisheries, especially as he witnessed the decline of the Yankee whaling industry. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1878, he took a job as clerk with the U.S. Fish Commission, which at the time was headed by the Smithsonian’s second Secretary, Spencer Fullerton Baird.

Spencer Fullerton Baird. Smithsonian Archives – History Div, 46853/oval or 2004-60740. http://siarchives.si.edu/history/spencer-fullerton-baird.

While Secretary of the Smithsonian, Baird also decided to serve as the first Commissioner of the U.S. Fish Commission (a precursor to NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service). Under Baird’s guidance, the Commission became a robust scientific enterprise, undertaking extensive surveys of fisheries along all U.S. coastlines, censuses of fishery laborers, and also collecting data on target species and fisheries infrastructure. Baird was strategic about his influence, and he used the expansion of the Commission as an opportunity to hire promising young naturalists — such as True — and get their foot in the door at the Smithsonian.

Recruited by Baird, True was initially a special agent for the U.S. Fish Commission, but eventually Baird put him in charge of the joint Smithsonian-U.S. Fish Commission display at the Berlin Fisheries Exhibition of 1880, where many of the specimens collected by special agents for the Commission were put on display. At the time, the Smithsonian lacked an official library (for various historical reasons), and Baird rectified this situation in 1881 by donating his own personal library to form the core of a new research library at the Smithsonian. Baird recognized True’s diligence and acumen as a reseacher, and hired him to lead it. True seized on the opportunity, and improved on the idea immediately, forming divisional libraries to meet the specialized needs of individual curators, which still continue to this day (such as the Kellogg Library of marine mammalogy, named in honor of Remington Kellogg, who never met True but succeeded him as a Smithsonian marine mammalogist).

Remington Kellogg. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image Number 78-3701. http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_11289.

True sometimes diverged from his role as a librarian to fill a void as acting curator of mammals; Baird, who noted True’s ambition and drive, soon appointed him curator of mammals in 1883. While microscopic descriptions were the rage in natural history at the time, True’s poor eyesight made this type of work difficult. True instead recognized the wealth of marine mammals specimens at the Smithsonian that had been generated in part by Baird’s collections from the Commission, as well as collections made by Captain Charles M. Scammon in the North Pacific Ocean in the 1870s and the prolific Edward Drinker Cope, who had been hired by Baird to write a monograph on cetaceans, which only came to partial fruition. Thus, True had the opportunity and motivation to expand his interest in marine fisheries and take on the study of cetaceans.

At the same time, True recognized the need to expand and grow the collections for the U.S. National Museum (USNM, the forerunner of what today is called the National Museum of Natural History, or NMNH). In a shrewd and practical move, True encouraged keepers of lighthouses and life-saving stations along the U.S. coasts to collect stranded specimens and data on marine mammals. True’s 1884 guide on the topic effectively presaged the logic of the modern marine mammal stranding network, which only formally took effect with the U.S. Marine Mammal Act of 1972.

Suggestions to the keepers of the U.S. life-saving stations, light-houses, and light-ships; and to other observers, relative to the best means of collecting and preserving specimens of whales and porpoises. True, F.W.  (1884). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/16177227.

True capitalized on Baird’s support by expanding collecting efforts, both opportunistically as part of industries and fisheries, and with more dedicated expeditions with specific curators at USNM. For example, the Smithsonian’s involvement with the Western Union Telegraph Expedition to Alaska in 1865 brought William H. Dall, a paleontologist who later would work for both the U.S. Geological Survey and the Smithsonian, into the collaborative fold. As a tribute to Dall’s impact, True named Dall’s porpoise, Phocaena dalli (now Phocoenoides dalli) in 1885 based on a description, drawings and specimen collected by Dall in Alaska. Unfortunately, this specimen was initially shipped to the Army Medical Museum by mistake, where rats chewed up the postcranial elements. (The skull is now all that is now left of the holotype specimen).

Dall’s porpoise (Phocoenoides dalli). Proceedings of the United States National Museum. v. 8 (1885). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/15383677.

In 1895, the U.S. Fish Commission called True back into service for a study on the Northern fur seal industry in the Pribilof Islands, off Alaska. The Commission, lacking confidence in the local Russian naturalist’s conclusion about sustainable yield of fur seal skins from the islands’ rookeries, launched their own investigations. True, as he would in other field expeditions, brought along his father-in-law, D. W. Prentiss, as well as one of his chief preparators, William H. Palmer, who collected specimens while there. (Palmer would also later collect Miocene fossil marine mammals for True in Calvert County, Maryland). En route to the Pribilofs, the team dropped off another Smithsonian curator, Leonhard Stejneger, at the Commander Islands, near the Kamchatka Peninsula of modern-day Russia. Stejneger, who slightly preceded True, collected many marine mammals as well, including a beaked whale specimen that True named for him, Mesoplodon stejnegeri. True’s report on their work at the Pribilofs offered novel conservation strategies for the population, although he viewed a ban on pelagic sealing as the only effective strategy.

In 1899, True travelled to Newfoundland where a shore based whaling operation had been started by the Cabot Whaling Company at Snooks Arm in Notre Dame Bay. True joined the crew on the steam powered ships as they harpooned and returned to the station fin whales, as well as a smaller number of humpbacks. True observed and photographed the whaling operation, but also participated in crew activities, even including manning the harpoon on a successful fin whale hunt. As whales were flensed and processed, True availed himself of an opportunity to study the whale’s anatomy, especially at a second station that was opened at Balaena Station in Hermitage Bay, Newfoundland, in 1901. There, the primary target species were blue whales, which were too fast and too large for earlier fisheries to tackle. This operation offered an exciting new opportunity to study them, and generated important collections for the USNM, including a full plaster cast of one individual for the St. Louis Exposition of 1903.

Remington Kellogg and Leonhard Stejneger with the 1903 blue, or sulphur-bottom, whale, on exhibit in the Natural History Museum, c. 1930s. Image from Smithsonian Institution Archives.

True’s ultimate contributions to marine mammal science were three profound monographs on Cetaceans. Grace Costantino provided a nice summary of his 1899 monograph on oceanic dolphins (A Review of the Family Delphinidae) at BHL’s blog last week. True’s lengthy Whalebone Whales of the Western North Atlantic in 1904 marked the first affirmative answer to whether baleen whales on opposite sides of the Atlantic constituted the same species and populations. To arrive at that conclusion, True provided the first extensive review of the validity of earlier descriptions of American whales by Scammon and Cope, an effort which relied on his own travels to other museum collections, and the rapidly growing one at his home institution (USNM). His 1910 work on beaked whales (An Account of the Beaked Whales of the Family Ziphiidae) similarly cleared up a mess of older taxonomic names for this enigmatic group of toothed whales, which have been a special strength of the Smithsonian since the time of Baird. In the past 100 years, many beaked whale species have been named after Smithsonian curators and other research associates, including: Baird’s beaked whale (Berardius bairdii), Stejneger’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon stejnegeri), True’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon mirus) and Perrin’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon perrini by emeritus curator of marine mammals James G. Mead). For his own contributions, True’s name is bestowed on the common names of two rodent species that he described and published on from Asia.

Head of True’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon mirus). Proceedings of the United States National Museum. v. 45 (1913). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/7307255.

In True’s entry for the Dictionary of American Biography, Alexander Wetmore (an ornithologist, Smithsonian curator, and the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian) reflected that True was “profound as a student, and exact and punctilious as an administrative officer,” traits that no doubt served him well in his major capacities at USNM. By 1897, True was appointed head curator of the Department of Biology, with broad administrative direction over all biological work at USNM, and served as acting secretary of the entire institution for a short period of time that year. When the natural history collections of USNM moved across the National Mall to the newly built natural history building in 1910 (today, the main museum for NMNH), True became assistant secretary of the Smithsonian in charge of the library and of the international exchange service, a position that he occupied until his death in 1914.

The Delphinidae: Cetacean Taxonomy’s “Trash Basket”

When you think of oceanic dolphins, chances are you don’t think of trash. But if you’re a taxonomist, you might.

“The family Delphinidae has been called a ‘taxonomic trash basket’, because many small to medium-sized odontocetes of various forms have been lumped together in this group for centuries” (Dr. Edward Vanden Berghe, Flanders Marine Institute. WoRMS. Delphinidae).

Fig B: Commerson’s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus commersonii); Fig. C: white-beaked dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris); Fig. D: short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis); with the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) – Fig. A. (Listed by True as Phocaena communis within Delphinidae. Today named Phocoena phocoena in Phocoenidae family) in BHL. Norman, J.R. Field Book of Giant Fishes (1949). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/6279181.

Even today, multiple classifications exist, and depending on the schema used, anywhere from 30-50 species may be attributed to Delphinidae, ranging in size from 1-9.1 meters (see various taxonomies in EOL, WoRMS, Marine Mammal Science, and Animal Diversity Web). The distribution of Delphinidae species across such wide and diverse habitats and the lack of data for many members of the family impede conclusive taxonomic assertions regarding species distinctions and relationships.

Regardless of the questions still remaining, members of the Delphinidae family share many characteristics, including numerous conical teeth, compression and fusion of the neck vertebrae, and sophisticated echolocation ability.

Short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis). Gemeinnüzzige Naturgeschichte des Thierreichs. Bd. 2 Plates (1780). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/28342227.

The quest to understand and organize oceanic dolphins is one that requires patience and the continual acquisition of knowledge and data. This has been the reality since scientists first attempted to classify these marine mammals, and one poignantly felt by one of the world’s foremost cetacean authorities at the turn of the century: Frederick William True.

F.W. True: Pioneering Cetologist

Frederick W. True (1858-1914) began his career as a clerk at the U.S. Fish Commission in 1878. In 1881, he was hired by S.F. Baird as Librarian and Acting Curator of Mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, after which he was promoted to Head Curator of Biology in 1897 – a position he held until 1911 when he became the Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. With a focus on living and marine fossil mammals, True was the first marine mammals curator at the Smithsonian. Though he is most famous for his work on the mysticetes and beaked whales, True also provided invaluable contributions to the study of the Delphinidae family.

Frederick W. True. Image Courtesy the Smithsonian Institution Archives | Image # MAH-11716 http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_10333

At the turn of the century, the status of the Delphinidae family was even more confusing than it is today. The widespread distribution of the family meant that the same species might actually be found off the coasts of every continent (the common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) for example, has a worldwide range). More crucially, the lack of access to the specimens and data of scientists in different parts of the world, led to the tendency of some naturalists (such as Edward Drinker Cope) to base new species descriptions on scant data (often relying on a single, perhaps incomplete, specimen to assert a new species). Consequently, our turn of the 20th century understanding of Delphinidae was saturated with questionable, often synonymous, scientific names.

Common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Beddard, Frank E. A Book of Whales (1900). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/1398413.

True recognized that scientists at the time used non-uniform criteria to describe and classify species. Some based descriptions on external characteristics, while other relied on osteological examinations, resulting in, as True put it, two series of species. Varied criteria employment also resulted in drastically different classification schemes, resulting in a plethora of competing taxonomic trees for both Delphinidae and related families.

The preponderance of oceanic dolphin scientific names and uncertainty of species relationships was a major impediment to the advancement of Delphinidae research. Near the end of the nineteenth century, True set out to bring order to the chaos.

Revising the Delphinidae

True began his endeavor with a focus on the species found off the North American coasts, but the state of affairs compelled him to expand his scope to the entire Delphinidae family. Though his work was largely based on that of Gray, Flower, Stejneger and Baird, True was the first person to attempt to analyze all available data, harmonize the many synonyms, and produce a classified list of truly distinct Delphinidae species.

True quickly realized that “a proper comparison of the species described respectively by European and American naturalists could not be made without an examination of the types.” Thus, in the winter of 1883-84, True spent four months in the museums of England and Europe studying the type specimens of the described Delphinidae species. The result of his labor was the publication Contributions to the natural history of the cetaceans. A review of the family Delphinidae, which presented a revised Delphinidae classification.

During his time abroad, True kept a journal recording the observations, measurements and data he gathered. These records were used to inform the aforementioned publication. Dr. Nick Pyenson, current Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, recently discovered this journal amongst a box of True’s manuscripts and research materials in the Smithsonian’s Remington Kellogg Library of Marine Mammalogy.

F.W. True’s Journal (1883-84). Data recorded from specimens at European and English museums. Used to inform True’s Delphinidae publication.

As the journal (1883-84) shows, True carefully examined and measured all of the type specimens he could find, including specimen catalog numbers, locality, sex and age if known, various lengths including total, length of beak, and girth, and other data such as the number of teeth. These kinds of data remain relevant today, where the consistent collection and curation of this irreplaceable data provides the basis for answering many different ecological, evolutionary and conservation research questions.

F.W. True’s Journal (1883-84). Data recorded from specimens at European and English museums. Used to inform True’s Delphinidae publication.

Even more interesting, the logbook is annotated by Remington Kellogg, the aforementioned library’s namesake and himself an authority on cetaceans. Though his time at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History postdated True’s lifetime, Kellogg took a keen interest in True’s work and annotated many of his manuscripts, including not only this journal but also True’s fieldbook of collecting trips in 1906-08.

True. F.W. U. S. National Museum log book of collecting trips for fossil cetaceans (1906-08). Digitized by the Smithsonian Institution Archives for The Field Book Project. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/46701241.

The measurements and osteological examinations recorded in True’s 1883-84 journal were used to create limits of specific variation among species and inform a comparative analysis of species relationships to produce a revised taxonomic tree. The result was the harmonization of existing scientific names down to a total of 62, classified within 19 genera and 2 subfamilies within Delphinidae.

Of course, the science of taxonomy is not a static endeavor. Classifications are constantly improving and evolving as we have access to new information and specimens, discover new species, and employ new techniques (such as DNA sequencing) in our quest to better understand the world and the species in it. Indeed, even True himself acknowledged that the accuracy of classifications was dependent on the availability of data and the construction of a full biological picture. In his publication, True asserted,

“The writer is fully aware that the time is not yet ripe for a final review of the family Delphinidae. The work now accomplished must be regarded as provisional and subject to change in the future…Cetologists must be content to wait patiently until the acquisition of new specimens make a complete description possible.”

And indeed, new information has come to light since True revised the Delphinidae family over 100 years ago. While the total number of species, genera, and subfamilies differ depending on the classification schema used, of the 62 distinct species that True recognized, 38 are recognized as distinct today (though some under different names), and 32 are still included in the Delphinidae family. Twenty-four of the species True classified as distinct are now considered representatives of other species cataloged in his publication or are not recognized as distinct species today (i.e. nomen dubium). While many of the binomials employed by True are today considered invalid synonyms (though some have changed only slightly in spelling), 15 of the names included by True are still considered valid. (Comparisons made on whole species binomial. Data based on taxon information in WoRMS collected 1/30/2015. Note: some researchers have proposed using Sagmatias for species of Lagenorhynchus today — so Sag. amblodon may get resurrected.)

Table Comparing the species names presented by True (“True’s Species”) with the corresponding valid species names recognized today (“Today’s Species). Each unique species listed under “Today’s Species” is highlighted with a distinct color, and all names employed by True in the “True’s Species” column are color coded with the valid name they are recognized to represent today. The “Family” column indicates the taxonomic family to which the species identified by True are today understood to belong to. Comparisons based on taxon information in WoRMS collected on 1/30/2015.

Scientific Research in the Digital Age

The efficiency of scientific research depends on access to raw data, specimens, and previously published information. During True’s lifetime, access to this information was especially difficult, resulting in the proliferation of competing taxonomies. Satisfying information needs often required expensive trips across oceans and countries to consult dispersed institutional collections.

Today, open access digitization initiatives are working to provide global, online access to the information required to study, describe, and classify life. The digitization of museum specimens, scientist’s raw data contained in unpublished fieldbooks, and centuries’ worth of published natural history literature allows researchers to draw connections among all of this information, see the work upon which current systems are based, compare notes across disciplines and time, and more easily harmonize synonyms and create classifications. The Biodiversity Heritage Library and The Field Book Project, through the digitization of natural history fieldbooks and publications, are two programs amidst a growing cadre of initiatives dedicated to facilitating discovery of the natural world. Through continued collaboration and a commitment to open access, we can improve the efficiency of scientific research across the globe.

For more fun, browse historic Delphinidae illustrations from BHL: http://ow.ly/IuYCX

With contributions by: Dr. Nick Pyenson | Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals, NMNH

Recent crowdsourcing initiatives are revolutionizing scientific research, allowing the public to help scientists and researchers document, identify, and better understand biodiversity.

For example, the Atlas of Living Australia’s FieldData program allows anyone to contribute sightings, photos and observational data to help researchers and natural resource management groups collect and manage biodiversity data. Birds Australia is using this data to help record sightings of Carnaby’s Black-Cockatoo to inform conservation initiatives for this endangered species.

As another example, in 2013 a new mammal species, the olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina), was discovered in South America, the first carnivore species to be discovered in the Americas in 35 years. Scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History are using citizen science-contributed observational data and photos to learn more about the new species.

BHL has taken advantage of crowdsourcing’s potential, implementing several initiatives to improve access to BHL images, support OCR correction and transcription, and generate semantic metadata for the BHL portal.

Art of Life: Improving Access to Images

The Art of Life project, funded by NEH and based at the Missouri Botanical Garden, has been making active progress on its objective of improving access to the natural history illustrations within BHL. The image-finding algorithms developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art Lab have been run across 18 million BHL pages and you’ll now notice a significant increase in the number of pages tagged as having illustrations within the BHL portal. Pages with illustrations are currently being manually classified by volunteers as belonging to one or more image types: drawing, table, photograph, map, and/or bookplate. A few examples in the BHL portal include:

• http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/11001670
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/11001551
• http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/3601565
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/12284099

Example of how metadata now displays descriptive information about the types of images found within BHL pages.

Next steps for the project are to crowdsource descriptions for the image’s content (e.g. subjects, dates, illustrator) through platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about the Art of Life project, which runs through April of 2015.

Learn how you can help tag BHL’s illustrations in Flickr.

On a related note, we will also be crowdsourcing BHL image descriptions through another platform, Zooniverse, the premier host for citizen science projects. This opportunity came about through a partnership with Constructing Scientific Communities (aka ConSciCom). More details will be forthcoming in a future blog post but expect to see BHL content available in Zooniverse in late spring or early summer of 2015.

Purposeful Gaming and BHL: Playing at OCR Correction and Transcriptions

Another crowdsourcing BHL project called Purposeful Gaming and BHL, funded by IMLS and based at the Missouri Botanical Garden, has been making significant strides in its objective to improve access to BHL texts through gamifying the text correction process. Digital outputs of BHL text are created both through automated (OCR of published text) and manual means (transcription of hand-written text from ornithologist William Brewster). Multiple outputs of the same page are then compared and differences incorporated into an online digital game in which the public will help verify the accuracy of individual words. Those corrections will then be incorporated back into the BHL portal for viewing by users and to enable full text searching. The project’s game designer, Tiltfactor, has recently completed and beta-tested 2 initial prototypes for both gaming and non-gaming audiences. The final games are expected to go live in May 2015. Learn more about the Purposeful Gaming project, which runs through November of 2015.

William Brewster’s journals available for transcription in the ALA/Australian Museum Biodiversity Volunteer Portal.

Help us transcribe William Brewster’s journals and diaries in the ALA/Australian Museum Biodiversity Volunteer Portal (click on any of the William Brewster projects listed) and FromThePage! Find guidelines for transcribing the documents here.

Mining Biodiversity: Semantics and the Crowd

In the near future, the Mining Biodiversity Project, whose USA partners’ participation is also funded by IMLS, will be crowdsourcing the creation of a gold standard annotated set of pages to train the mining algorithms that will search for named entities (ie. concepts like taxa, places, people, habitat, traits). After that, a bigger group of volunteers will help validating the pre-annotated relations through time (events) automatically discovered from our BHL corpus. Learn more about the Mining Biodiversity Project, which runs through December 2015.

The Field Book Project: Improving Access to Researchers’ Fieldnotes

The Smithsonian Field Book Project has been hard at work discovering and making accessible field book materials through cataloging, digitization, and online publication. Thanks to dedicated staff and volunteers, the Project has made huge strides in that direction. To date, 90 fieldbooks digitized by The Field Book Project have been ingested into BHL.

However, no celebration of success would be complete without a mention of the passionate “volunpeers” of the Smithsonian Transcription Center. Field books are often difficult to search and read due to their age and generally hand-written entries; pages may be faded and smudged, handwriting may be cramped or scribbled or stained by exposure to the elements, and the author may have used symbols and index marks that are foreign to modern readers. Unless a researcher knows exactly what they are looking for, they may be discouraged by the time and effort it takes to parse the archival text. Thankfully, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, which opened to the public on August 12th, has included the Field Book Project as one of its partners since the very beginning, allowing us to ask the crowd for assistance in conducting detailed readings and transcribing of field book content.

James Peter’s fieldnotes from Mexico (1949-50), transcribed for The Field Book Project in the Smithsonian Transcription Center.

Each item that goes into the Transcription Center must first be transcribed and then reviewed by a volunpeer, who must create an account and can then access both the training documents on the site and also the rich community on the Center and on related social media platforms for questions and answers. Several of the volunpeers have become “super users,” transcribing and reviewing a large volume of material, and also serving as rich information sources for new transcribers on how to document tricky situations such as foreign characters, symbols, marginalia, and in field books in particular, the scientific names for observed flora and fauna.

At last count there were 84 items in the Transcription Center, 69 of which had been fully transcribed, an incredible resource for researchers and reference archivists alike! More fieldbooks are being added continuously and the eventual goal is to place those completed transcriptions into BHL alongside the original field books. The crowd of volunpeers has and is enabling the Field Book Project to offer more and better access to everyone from professional researchers to curious onlookers, and sometimes even leads researchers to information that may never have been discovered without the dedicated assistance of the volunpeers on the Smithsonian Transcription Center.

Become a volunpeer today and help us transcribe field notes to improve access to these valuable primary-source documents!

We Love Our Users!

With over 44 million pages of biodiversity literature, several million images, and a desire to continuously improve access to and discovery of these materials, leveraging the power of the crowd is a match made in heaven for BHL. With contributions from our users, we can ensure that our wealth of biodiversity information can continue to inspire discovery of the natural world. Thank you for your contributions, and if you’d like to know more about how you can contribute, send us feedback.

Trish Rose-Sandler, BHL Data Analyst, Missouri Botanical Garden
Julia Blase, Project Manager, The Field Book Project
Grace Costantino, BHL Outreach and Communication Manager

The Art of Life project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Grant number PW-51041-12).

Mining Biodiversity is funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant number LG-00-14-0032-14).

Purposeful Gaming is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant number LG-05-13-0352-13).

American Archives Month celebrates the importance of archives and the work of archivists as they seek to collect, organize, and make accessible unique materials from our nation’s history. The Smithsonian Field Book Project is an exciting example of such work, an effort across SI departments and divisions to increase accessibility to field book content. Field books are important because they are the primary source records of flora, fauna, and ecosystem biodiversity research. They hold the first observations, thoughts, and reflections of scientific researchers when they venture out to observe, document, and collect specimens of the natural world.

A field book can contain everything from grass specimens to weather observations to recipes for native foods, and at the Smithsonian, document almost 200 years of history, going back to 1815! Field books not only provide invaluable access to species and habitat data, but also contain surprising insights and observations into the history of science and history in general – see Edward Chapin’s mention of the Panama Disease in banana plantations in Jamaica in 1941, for example, or Leonard Shultz’s observations during the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests in 1952, or Devra Kleiman’s notes on how financial instability in Brazil in 1990 was affecting her project to save the Golden Lion Tamarin from extinction (she was successful!).

Rafinesque, C. S. Notebook kept by Rafinesque on a trip from Philadelphia to Kentucky, 1818. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/45995976

The first part of the Field Book Project focused on discovering, documenting, and preserving these invaluable records, using customized cataloging and description standards to better suit materials that are not just historical, but that also function as museum and library reference materials for present-day researchers. Catalog records for the field books have been created and made available on several public, online platforms (such as Smithsonian Collections Search Center) in order to engage with as wide an audience as possible. Thus, field books that might have been previously scattered, stored amidst other materials, and unknown to any but those in their department can now be found and used by researchers across and beyond the Smithsonian Institution.

The next phase of the Project will focus on continuing to discover, catalog, and preserve Smithsonian field books, while expanding the goal of digitization and online availability. A selection of field books (2600) will be digitized using dedicated scanning equipment, and the fully digitized records will be published to both the Smithsonian Collections Search Center website and to the Biodiversity Heritage Library web portal. The renewed focus on not just discovery, but also digitization stems from the potential for connection that these field books represent. In many cases, we’ve found that our field books relate to field books and specimen collections of other museums and research institutions across the country, and even internationally!

Moynihan, Martin. Gull Notes, 1955-56. Fieldbook from The Field Book Project in the Smithsonian Transcription Center. https://transcription.si.edu/project/6829

We’ve seen new and expanded uses of our digitized field books that make us excited to provide more opportunities to the community of researchers. The Project has contributed many of the digitized field books to the Smithsonian Transcription Center. These resources have inspired the interest of our “volunpeers” who have not only described content for machine-readability and full-text searching, but have also discovered new information in the field books that the project team can use to enrich the catalog records. Now, we are even using the documentation and guidelines from this project to help support the creation and ongoing work of similar projects at Smithsonian and Biodiversity Heritage Library partner institutions.

The more field books and similar collections we can help make discoverable, the more we can connect the content to related research, and the more we contribute to ongoing projects in both the scientific and humanities fields. The Smithsonian Field Book Project is an exciting and ongoing example of how archivists help to find, preserve, and make available fascinating historical materials that still retain great importance for present-day scientific and historical research.

Silberglied, Robert E. Field notes, Mexico, July-August, 1965. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/46042458

If you are interested in learning more about the project or in reading some of the transcribed content – or even in transcribing some yourself! – please visit the project website or our collection in the Smithsonian Transcription Center and see what you can do to help make field books, unique and invaluable archival, library, and museum resources, increasingly available and discoverable to the wider public.

Julia Blase
Project Manager, The Field Book Project 

Last week, with the arrival of many more of the field books to the Biodiversity Heritage Library web portal, I had the chance to dive deeply into the field books of Edward Chapin, entomologist and Curator of Insects at the Smithsonian Institution from 1934 to 1954. I spent the most time in his field book covering a set of travels to Cuba and Jamaica, though mostly Jamaica, in 1937 and 1941. It was a fascinating adventure “down the rabbit hole” into another era of history!

The beetles, bad weather, and endless driving

Entry from Edward A. Chapin’s “Field notebook, Cube and Jamaica, 1937, 1941, [1947].” Smithsonian Institution Archives. SIA Acc. 11-085, Box 1, Folder 1.

Several things struck me almost as soon as I began reading, the first of which was how closely Chapin’s descriptions of the insect life of the islands were wrapped with his observations of the weather, travel conditions, car problems, dinner menus, host families and housing arrangements, and even clothing purchases. A set of observations on insect collecting might be as short as a sentence or as long as a page, depending on what caught his attention that day. The second item that struck me was how frustrating these kinds of expeditions could be! Not only Chapin deal with the usual traveler’s woes of lost luggage and poor weather, but he also faced challenges unique to the scientist – the difficulty in finding many types of insects, or one insect in many life stages, or in finding relevant insects at all. It seemed that Chapin sometimes spent days driving from one end of the island to the other, looking for abandoned homes, downed trees, fence posts and post holes, and such beetle- and termite-friendly places to explore, and often finding nothing. However, on other days he was so overwhelmed with his findings that the problem became locating additional jars to hold them all!

Sugar factories, banana plantations, and Panama Disease

I also went further down the field book “rabbit hole” with items that Chapin mentioned seemingly offhand. For instance, in one of his entries, he described his visit to a sugar factory and detailed the process by which cane became sucrose and molasses, which I found fascinating. He followed that entry with one describing the tour of the banana plantations on the island, and how the banana carriers (those who took bunches from the rows of plants to spots along the road where they would be loaded into trucks) received only “three shillings a hundred bunches. The work is hard as it means tramping through mud six or eight inches deep for fifty yards or so with about 150 lbs balanced on the head.” I immediately looked online for a recording of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” and began to read about its history as a Jamaican folk song – the song seems so lighthearted, compared to the work it describes. I can hardly imagine the kind of daily labor that the banana carriers endured.

Chapin even made a brief mention of Panama Disease affecting the banana plants on the island – I did a bit of research and discovered that another strain of Panama Disease is the current cause of problems with the Cavendish banana that we all enjoy at our local grocery stores. “Race 1” of the disease was the cause of the epidemic in the 1950’s that wiped out the previously farmed Gros Michel banana. Chapin’s 1941 journal was recording the disease almost 10 years before it became a widespread problem!

New Seville and Christopher Columbus

I fell into more research when Chapin mentioned a visit to Seville, which was

“now a large coconut walk but originally the site of the first Roman Catholic cathedral (1505). The foundations have been cleared and in the center of the floor there is a hole about six feet across and ten feet deep, carefully walled with brick, from which a passage leads away to the west. In this passage we found a dozen pieces of very beautifully carved stone, probably the remains of the altar. One piece has the coat-of-arms of the Bishop of Seville, the others are mostly angels and cherubims.”

I did a quick search for “Seville, Jamaica” and found a UNESCO world heritage website for “New Seville,” which hosted Christopher Columbus in the late 1490s and did indeed feature a Roman Catholic church of “Peter Martyr, the first abbot of Jamaica, having begun in 1525.” Someone’s dates are off…I’m inclined to think that Chapin was misled in thinking the church was from 1505, but who knows? At least I learned more about the history of Columbus’ voyages in the new world, and just in time for Columbus Day (October 13th).

WWII Internment Camps

Entry from Edward A. Chapin’s “Field notebook, Cube and Jamaica, 1937, 1941, [1947].” Smithsonian Institution Archives. SIA Acc. 11-085, Box 1, Folder 1.

One more historical mention led me to another fifteen minutes or so of research – Chapin’s off-hand mention that the husband in one of the families he met on the island was “at present serving at the internment camp as a guard.” The history I knew of U.S. internment camps during WWII only covered the Japanese-American internment camps in the West. I had no idea that there were internment camps in Jamaica. Who did they hold? A quick search revealed that not only were there internment camps on the islands, but that they held both plantation owners who were of German descent and thus “possibly” sympathizers, as well as the German POW’s from U-boats taken in the Atlantic (see also the one-sentence mention of the German POW barracks in Up Park Camp on this page).

The mongoose and the dolphins

And finally, there were two mentions of animals that I found fascinating. The first was a mention of the mongoose, an invasive species introduced to the islands to prey on the rats that destroyed large amounts of sugar cane. As in many other places, the non-native species proved far more destructive than imagined and became more of a problem than the rats themselves even in 1941. The mongoose lives on the islands to this day, and has contributed to the possible extinction of at least four native species. And second, a mention by Chapin of his journey home, where he was off the coast of Cape Hatteras and recorded being

“in the midst of the herd of bottlenosed dolphins headed north on their annual migration. As far as one can see, in every direction, there are thousands of dolphins moving steadily northward. On either side of the bow, our boat is convoyed by groups of from three to ten animals…we first sighted them at four in the afternoon and they were still with us at dark.”

Today herds of dolphins are recorded as numbering only in the hundreds during their winter migration – nevertheless, what a lovely image with which to conclude my research adventures in the field notebooks of Edward A. Chapin, entomologist, traveler, and recorder of both scientific and humanist history.

For more information

For more information about Edward Chapin, and to see the full records for his field books held at the Smithsonian Institution, please see his records in the Smithsonian Collections Search Center.

As of this blog post, three field books by Edward Chapin have been fully digitized and are available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library site.

Each of the three field books in BHL has been fully transcribed by volunteers with the Smithsonian Transcription Center. You can find them at the following three links: Cuba and Jamaica, Colombia, Chile.

Letter from Edward A. Chapin’s “Field notebook, Cube and Jamaica, 1937, 1941, [1947].” Smithsonian Institution Archives. SIA Acc. 11-085, Box 1, Folder 1.