Guest Blogger: Kendra Hay, Information Connections

For the past four months, I have had the pleasure of working with the California Academy of Sciences as Information Connections Research Intern on Connecting Content—a project to digitize field books and natural history collections from seven partnering institutions, generate metadata for each, and link these digitized collections to published work in a variety of ways.

My primary task has been to review scanned journals and letters for taxa names, conduct research to verify the scientific name of those taxa identified, and enter said names into the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) catalog. In doing so, I sought to identify idiosyncrasies found in the various types of materials, standardize notation methods for each identified, and create a workflow for future interns and volunteers.

To date, I have worked on E.W. Gifford's Galapagos Bird journals from 1905 and 1906 (California Academy of Sciences), the John Torrey correspondence from the 1830s-50s (New York Botanical Garden), the journals of Walter Deane from 1882 and 1891 (Harvard University Herbaria), the George Engelmann papers from the 1850s, 1860s and 1880s (Missouri Botanical Garden), and the Warren Manning correspondence from 1894-98 (Harvard University Ernst Mayer Library). Altogether, I have reviewed 2,049 pages and identified over 10,200 taxa and common names.

As a graduate student studying in the field of Library and Information Science, I found this project of particular interest. Establishing context between library and other collections or ‘connecting content’ is the wave of the future; librarians and archivists, like so many other professionals, must begin to grapple with this challenge. This project has been an amazing opportunity to explore how the partner institutions are beginning to approach these questions, and I look forward to seeing the new connections that the project generates.

- Kendra Hay