Over the last two decades, libraries and archives of natural history museums and botanical gardens in the US have spent major efforts to digitize their holdings. However, transporting these digitized resources from individual repositories to a wider community of researchers is challenging. Many of the primary resources are handwritten which limits their use and reuse because cursive writing and personal shorthand are difficult to decipher and the documents mostly lack machine readable data. This paper presents three case studies from the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) Botany Libraries and the Harvard University Ernst Mayr Library and Archives (EMLA) of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) that utilize crowd-sourcing, detailed access and discovery tools, and open access platforms to make handwritten materials more accessible to researchers by bridging content across collections held within and outside of Harvard University. The case studies show that different approaches can yield opportunities for mining data because transcription of handwritten documents and enhanced metadata allows searching previously unavailable words and phrases such as taxonomic names. Content contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the tools and services available in the BHL were integral to the work. The end result shows how information held in natural history libraries and archives contributes to the expansion of scientific and cultural historical knowledge by increasing access to previously unavailable historical scientific information through digitization, metadata enhancement and transcription.
The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (MCZ), founded in 1859, has approximately 20 million extant and fossil invertebrate and vertebrate specimens. These historical collections continue to be a focus of research and teaching for the MCZ, Harvard and outside researchers.The Ernst Mayr Library/Archives (EMLA) of the MCZ is a founding member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), an international consortium with a mission to make biodiversity literature openly available for use. Meeting the needs of the MCZ is a priority for EML Museum/library and achives collaboration One collaborative Museum/Library project was the digitization of approximately 81,000 MCZ specimen ledger pages/cards associated with various collections. These historical items, once digitized and deposited in the Harvard Digital Repository Service (DRS), were linked to the relevant specimen records in MCZbase, the museum-wide database. Over 1.2 million specimen records are now linked with digitized sources which benefit all users by adding to the provenance of the specimen data and allowing direct referral to the primary collection source.
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