Summer 2012: The Field Book Project is holding a series of brown bags for the departments participating in the project. Each brown bag is presented by a cataloger who has worked on field books within that department. Presenations contain similar content.
2. • Joint initiative between the National Museum of
Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution
Archives
• Mission: to create a Field Book Registry, one online
location for field book content everywhere.
• Beginning as a Smithsonian-wide initiative and
eventually including the entire biodiversity
community.
3. Why the Field Book Project?
• Related field books are not co-located
• Current access points are varied, minimally
descriptive:
– Finding Aids
– Inventory lists
– Bibliographic library catalog records
– Institutional memory
• No community-adopted standard
4. Phase 1:
Locally cataloged field books at the Smithsonian Institution
SI Division of SI Division of
Birds Mammals
SI Department of Smithsonian
Botany Institution
Field Book Archives
Registry
California Academy
of Sciences Field Phase 2: Other Museum’s
Field Books
Books Partner institutions and the
larger community contribute
field book records
5. What do we consider Field Books?
*Unpublished, original record of field events leading up to and including the
collection of biological specimens.
Field books we catalog may include Not currently included in the project:
• Published notes
• Specimen Lists / field catalogs • Laboratory notes
• Journals with descriptions of specimen
collecting • Copied (photocopied, hand copied,
• Hand drawn or annotated maps of microfilmed) notes standing in for
collecting localities originals.
• Field sketches of specimens • Anthropological notes.
• Field photographs of specimens • Geological notes unaccompanied by
• Field correspondence paleobiological notes.
6. Specimen list /journals
Photos of specimens in the field
Field sketches of specimens
Maps of collecting localities
Letters about collecting events
7. What is the Field Book Project Doing?
Cataloging
Creating collection and item records for field books in:
– Department of Botany
– Division of Birds
– Division of Mammals
– Smithsonian Libraries
– Smithsonian Institution Archives
Supplemental funds support:
• Preservation and Conservation
• Digitization
8. Cataloging Overview
EAC Organization NCD Collection
OrgId: EACO15 CollectionId: NCDC78
Name: Smithsonian Institution, Title: Edgar Alexander Mearns,
National Museum of Natural History, field books, 1890-1924
Division of Birds Owner: EACO15
Creator: EACP07
Description: 200 folders of Means's field
EAC Person notes on ornithological collecting and
observations in the Philippines, Kenya, …
PersonId: EACP07
Name: Mearns, Edgar A.
(Edgar Alexander), 1856-1916
Dates: 1856-1916 MODS Item
Biographical history: Edgar A. Mearns was MODSId: MODSI1281
a military doctor and prolific naturalist Collection: NCDC78
who collected birds, mammals, plants… Title: Field notes and Journal, March
25 - April 5, 1885
EAC Expedition Dates: 1881, 1885
ExpId: EACE0017 Creator: EACP07
Name: Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition: EACE 0017
Expedition Abstract: Mearns uses this journal to
Dates: 1909-1911 record his daily activities and lists of
Description: Under former President mostly birds and mammals seen
Theodore Roosevelt, the Smithsonian during his natural history research …
Institution-Roosevelt African Expedition …
9. Collection Record
• Describes context
and provenance
• Specifies
individual
creators
(people), geogra
phy, & subject
matter covered
10. Item Record
Records describe:
• Dates
• Collectors
• Geography
• Type of materials
• Summary of field
book content and
information collected
• Related
expeditions, organizat
ions, or individuals
11. People, Expeditions, Organizations
• Authorized
form of name
• Dates
– life and
death
– expedition
dates
– founding
and ending
dates
• Biography
13. Test Bed Digitization
Supplemental funding through SIA for some digitization
• Digitizing field notes
• Metadata
• Entry of digitized field notes and records into the Field
Book Registry
Questions about digitization? Read: http://nmnh.typepad.com/fieldbooks/2011/10/digitizing-fieldbooks.html
14. Field Book Registry
Prototype
• Approximately 5000 items cataloged
from 5 departments and multiple
biodiversity disciplines.
• File Maker Pro
20. Field Book Registry
Future of the Field Book Registry
• Incorporating field notes outside of Smithsonian
• Crowd sourced transcription
• OCR
• TaxonFinder
• Social tagging
• Data visualizations (timelines; maps)
21. Acknowledgements
Rusty Russell Anne Van Camp
Collections & Informatics, Botany Director, SI Archives
Carolyn Sheffield, Project Manager
Sonoe Nakasone, Cataloging Coordinator
Lesley Parilla, Cataloger and Graphics Designer
Emily Hunter, Cataloger
Kira Cherrix, Image and Video Digitization Specialist, SIA
Ricc Ferrante, Director of Digital Services, SIA
Tammy Peters, Supervisory Archivist, SIA
Nora Lockshin, Paper Conservator, SIA
Sarah Stauderman, Collections Care Manager, SIA
Kirsten Tyree, Conservation Technician, SIA
*Field books related to the same person or expedition are distributed throughout multiple departments and institutions.*Access points are inconsistent across collections. Some field books are described minimally in finding aids, inventories, catalog records. Some are not listed anywhere and are truly “hidden”*No community-adopted standard to control and provide better access
2 Major PhasesPhase 1 focusing on cataloging the approximately 6000 field books located at the Smithsonian Institution. We have also formed partnerships with institutions that have similar goals. Phase 2, the registry will be opened to our partner institutions. Eventually, museums from all over the country will be able to participate.
Original source data.
photographs, sketches, maps, and correspondence when it was created during a collecting event and documents field research
*The bulk of our activities support cataloging : 3 year grant from the Council of Library and Information Resources supporting cataloging field books at the Smithsonian Institution. Cataloging remains the bulk of our activities and short-term goals.*Supplemental funds: last year SIA received funds from Save America’s Treasures to perform physical conservation on field books.Smithsonian Women’s Committee fund also received to digitize a subset of the field book collections cataloged by our project.
On the left are the three types of EAC or authority records: organizations, people, and expeditions. On the right are the two levels at which we describe field notes.
A collection record provides an overview of a collection of field books.Ex. Mearns collection: over 200 items.Summarizes geographic locations, expeditions, names, and subject matter covered by all the field books in a collection.Contextual information—relationships between items within collectionNCD-Natural Collections Description: Kingdom, Taxonomic Coverage (at family level or higher), Common Name Coverage,
More detailed than inventory lists or brief finding aid descriptionsProvide enough critical information (“access points”) to help you find the field book you’re looking for: collector, date, geographic name, topic. Expedition name… Abstract: text field in which we will note whether measurements, elevations, coordinates, temperatures, details about the birds are included.
“authority records” : a standard resource about the entity described including how to write someone’s name, their life and death dates, and biographical information.
A portion of the project is committed to preserving field books. Although catalogers perform basic and quick preservation tasks in order to catalog, more complicated conservation treatments are performed by trained conservators.
Digitizing a subset of field notes at SIA and NMNH, however, no dedicated funding sources for digitization have been obtained.Digitization activities will include:Digitizing field notesMetadataEntry of digitized field notes and entry of field books into the Field Book Registry
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