Breathing Life into Dusty Museum Archives

• Published in: Bioscience Vol. 62; no. 10; p. 932
• Main Author: Watanabe, Myrna E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University of California Press 01-10-2012; Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Academic libraries; Archives; Archives & records; Archiving; BioBriefs; Biodiversity; Botanical gardens; Colleges & universities; Departments; Libraries; Library collections; Museum archives; Museum collections management; Museums; News and Opinion; Paleontology; Preservation; Science; Semantics; Semiotics; Syntax; Zoology
• ISSN: 0006-3568; 1525-3244
• DOI: 10.1525/bio.2012.62.10.17

Among the attendees was Russell, who has been considering for years an idea that would let his department "get a list of what we've got and share it more aggressively with other organizations and see what they've got." [...]began The Field Book Project, funded by the nonprofit Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Smithsonian Women's Committee, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the New York Botanical Garden, the California Academy of Sciences, Harvard's Herbarium and Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. With no financial resources and little free time, but with much interest, creativity, and 13 already transcribed field notebooks from malacologist Junius Henderson, the founder of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History; Rob Guralnick, invertebrate curator of zoology; and Andrea Thomer, a PhD student in library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, began putting Henderson's annotated field notebooks online.