Field Book Project

Field Report : 4/26/13

• Happy National Preservation Week! Check out how Smithsonian Institution Libraries is celebrating. [via Smithsonian Libraries Unbound].
• National Museum of American Indian (NMAI) just opened their exhibit, Ceramica de los Ancestros: Central America’s Past Revealed, last month. [via National Museum of the American Indian]. The designs are not unlike some documented in sketches in the field books of William Foshag.
• Feeling the fiesta spirit with the coming heat of summer? Check out Smithsonian Collections blog highlighting celebrations in Peru documented in the Elayne Zorn Collection in NMAI’s archives. [via Smithsonian Collections Blog]
• Old meets new. Check out the 3-D replication of whale fossils found in Chile. [via Smithsonian Science]
• Zooniverse's latest project is all about field notes!  Check out http://www.notesfromnature.org/ and help unlock historic biodiversity data!
• The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched its beta portal on April 18, making it possible to search across millions of items in collections across the country. [via Digital Public Library of America] 
• Talking of fossils, check out the novel way this museum selected a fossil to be removed from its plaster jacket. [via Canadian Museum of Nature blog]

Field Report: 3/8/2013

• We can’t wait for the exhibition Time and Navigation which will open in April 3013 at the National Air and Space Museum. The Navigating at sea portion will include the vastly influential US Exploring Expedition (also known as the Wilkes Expedition). [via National Air and Space Museum]
• This is why we love crowd sourcing! Smithsonian Collections Blog featured an unidentified image of a tree and Citizen Scientists jumped to the task of identifying it. [via Smithsonian Collections Blog]
• Speaking of crowd sourcing, iDigBio hosted an Augmenting OCR Hackathon to improve parsing of digitized natural history specimen labels. Hackathon participant Ben W. Brumfield blogged about his experience here. [via Collaborative Manuscript Transcription]
• Want to know what’s new in ecological research? The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) library has some new books on tap. [via Smithsonian Libraries Unbound]

Field Report: 2/19/2013

• Audio, Video, and PDF’s, Oh My! The Smithsonian Institution Archives launched several enhanced finding aids that include direct links to digitized content. Check out these three fully digitized field books of Edward Chapin. [via The Bigger Picture]
• The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is celebrating their 500th blog post this month! Read some of their favorite posts. [via Smithsonian Collections Blog]
• How to link specimen data to digitized content is an ongoing conversation. Our friends at the Henderson Field Notes Project ask, “What gets linked to global unique identifiers (GUIDs) in natural history collections digitization?” [via So You Think You Can Digitize]