Field Book Project

Letters from Amateur Collectors

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

I recently cataloged a type of collection well outside the norm for me: the correspondence between a scientist, Oscar L. Cartwright (SIA RU007338), and a wide range of collectors who provided specimens for his department. These collectors were scientists and enthusiasts. I was excited when I realized a substantial portion of field work documentation was from amateur collectors. Citizen scientists have made important contributions to Smithsonian research over the decades, but the documentation has not appeared in high concentrations in the collections we’ve cataloged.

Cartwright was an entomologist at the US National Museum who specialized in Scarabidae. The portion of Cartwright’s collection that I cataloged is comprised of correspondence, organized alphabetically with individually designated folders for major correspondents.

Over the last two years, while cataloging field notes, I have come to recognize that often people who study natural sciences come to it through a relationship (e.g. spouse or sibling) or a love of the topic. It doesn’t seem to be a line of work that attracts people just interested in a pay check. Scientists whose work we document usually conduct research because it is a lifelong interest that often extends well past their retirement from paid employment. The correspondence in this collection is intriguing because it demonstrates how the study of natural sciences can be of such personal value to a wide range of people, not just those who pursue it as a career.

The correspondence includes letters from Margay Bos who accompanied her husband when he went to work in Casabe, Colombia. She initially collected butterflies and later looked to collect beetles at Cartwright’s request. She wrote to Cartwright about her field work.

[February 10, 1957] When the company cuts a path into the jungles in search of oil, we butterfly girls go in just as soon as the company is through and with knives, we keep these lanes clear for our hobby. Most of the people here (well, really all of them except we three) would be afraid for their lives to go even outside of the camp, much less, in the jungles! For me I dread to see the day come when I have to leave here!

Additionally, correspondence also documents mentoring of enthusiasts. Charles Griffin corresponded with Cartwright about his collecting in Texas. Over the course of Cartwright’s correspondence with the man, he shares about various aspects and methods for collecting insects including recording standards, field work dangers, and reference texts. Cartwright also offers a sounding board for the young man who not only seems increasingly fascinated with collecting but struggles with a job that leaves him unfulfilled. Below Griffin asks Cartwright about how to deal with rattlesnakes.

Would like to ask your opinion concerning an eternal and disturbing problem. In all of the areas where the neotoma are found, rattlesnakes abound. I almost stepped on one Sunday. It was on the other side of a limb across the path traveled, which I was about to step over. Had it not rattled, or done so a moment later, it would surely have had me. Have you collected in rattlesnake infested brush? If so, what precautions did you take?

Cartwright’s answer:

The only thing I can tell you about rattlesnakes is to be extremely careful and to always carry a snake kit with you. In all of my collecting, I have seen probably no more than half a dozen live rattlesnakes. Same for the other poisonous snakes. In South Carolina, I once saw Professor Sherman step within six inches of a rattlesnake’s head and the snake didn’t move or rattle. But when I tried to catch it with a forked stick, moved to within 3 inches of its neck, it easily avoided the sudden thrust and began to rattle, ready to strike. I am not familiar with the habits of the diamondback, but would suspect them to be fast and quick to strike.

  These letters document the collecting by housewives, businessmen, and career scientists. They demonstrate the dedication, challenges, and joys experienced by not just the people who pursue science as a career but also by those that do it for personal enjoyment. Additionally the letters show the time and energy scientists expend to encourage and mentor these individuals. This collection helps demonstrate the range of people and events that have contributed to the amazing natural history collections at the Smithsonian—from the expeditions to the individual collector.

Flash! Expedition Vessel

Expedition vessel as seen from shore of Tahiti in Papeete, during Smithsonian-Bredin Society Expedition, 1957. Photograph taken by Waldo Schmitt during the collecting expedition for the Invertebrate Zoology department. SIA2012-0653.

Panamania: Connecting Collections and Reaching New Audiences

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

On April 5th, I had the opportunity to be a part of a panel discussion with some of my Smithsonian colleagues at the Annual Conference for the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Society for History in the Federal Government.

Alexander Wetmore and Watson Perrygo in El Valle, Cocle, Panama, on 31 March 1951. Photograph included in the transcript of the Watson M. Perrygo Oral History Interviews by Pamela M. Henson, November 13, 1976, in Smithsonian Institution Archives. SIA2008-2948.

The panel presentation discussed current efforts by staff at Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) to connect collections and reach new audiences, through ongoing cataloging, digitization, and online exhibits. We focused on efforts relating to the materials that document Smithsonian’s long history of research in the Panama Canal Zone.

Institution Historian, Pamela Henson opened the session by introducing the Smithsonian’s role in the Survey of the Panama Canal 1910-1912, the work of scientists and collectors like Alexander Wetmore and Watson Perrygo, and the role of Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in ongoing research.

My portion of the panel session focused on Field Book Project cataloging methods and how these records can help researchers reconnect types of natural history documentation; followed by managing the flow of digital information (Kira Cherrix); and wrapping up with how to reach and engage new audiences with the resources we’re making available online (Courtney Bellizzi).

Over the last few years, SIA has strived to not only to make more archival resources available to the public in digital form but to do so in a way that is consistent, thorough, and will stand up to constantly changing technological standards. For my colleagues and I, this is in many ways our day-to-day work; it was exciting to step back and actually hear and discuss how it is taking shape.

The Field Book Project's core mission is to locate, identify and describe the field books of the Smithsonian in a registry available to the public. Over the past couple of years, the Project has generated thousands of records and made them available online through the Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center (SCSC). Through the efforts of SIA and a grant from Smithsonian Women’s Committee, we have also been able to begin imaging those field books. The field book catalog records in the registry provide the heart of the metadata for each one digitized.

Participating on this panel provided a great opportunity to illustrate just how these records enable connections between multiple collections. Field Book Registry catalog records don’t just provide metadata for the digitized field books. Collection and creator catalog records play an important role in providing context for the digitized items. My presentation discussed how creator records are proving useful in reestablishing connections between field books, specimens, and scientific publications. Want to learn more? The Field Book Presentation is available as a PDF [Download EAC_and_Panama_pres_parilla].

You can also read about how Encoded Archival Context (EAC) records can reconnect natural history documentation in the ongoing blog post series on expeditions, available online through Field Book Project and Biodiversity Heritage Library blogs.

Flash! Group Photo in Field

Group photograph in field by A. S. Hitchcock, 1918. A. Johnston, Scientific Director of United Fruit Co.; Van Dine, Director of Laboratory, Tropical Plant Research Foundation; Earle, of Herradura, presumably while collecting in Cuba. SIA2011-0574.

Dear Reader: Scientists with an Audience

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

I often wonder if the field book creators ever thought someone else would see their notes. Early in the project I got my answer while cataloging Waldo Schmitt’s collection (SIA RU007231). My favorite invertebrate zoologist often included anecdotes in his field notes, seemingly to entertain the reader. In his journal from the Smithsonian-Bredin Expedition to Society Islands, 1957, Waldo Schmitt wrote an apology of sorts to his readership. (If you wondering about the words that are not transcribed, please read our blog on penmanship. You’ll be really impressed how much I could decipher.)

Who ever read these mixed up notes must realize that I scarcely had time to write any, and some done at 2 a.m. only time and place to write. [?]’s bunk space in bow of ship. Jack Randall sleeps in dining alcove bunk so no table available. Captain in pilot house with [?] in “floor” (deck) and Chuck and Tom in state room. No place to write, less to spread papers out.

Waldo Schmitt, 1933, Hancock Pacific-Galapagos Expedition. RU007231. SIA2011-0773.

Many specimen collectors are not as avid about entertaining their possible audience as Waldo was, but I have come across other examples. One of my favorites is the inexplicable 2 volume set of field books by Harry Ladd (SIA RU007396) from his trip to Fiji in 1934. Harry Ladd studied paleontology and geology during much of the twentieth century. His 1934 notes are written as a series of letters (yes, epistolary) to someone only referred to as “Ed.” If anyone knows who Ed is, I’d love to know.

Recently I found my first example of an audience response. I cataloged the field notes of Helmut Buechner, an ecologist who kept extensive observation notes on vegetation and wildlife (SIA RU007279). For the late 1950’s to early 1960’s he recorded field notes via dictabelt. Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) houses these recordings. They were transcribed by Buechner’s staff during his lifetime. Due to condition and technological obsolescence, I cataloged the original recordings through the transcriptions.

This has introduced an interesting aspect to the notes beyond the knowledge that Buechner knew someone other than him would hear them. His observations are extensive, frequently describing wildlife behavior occurring every few minutes. I wondered how the transcriber dealt with the length of entries, some of which included tables. It seems that Buechner was thinking about his transcriber too, as seen below.

Mary, this is the end of the dictation for the 26th of June [1959]. I hope you haven’t minded taking down dictation from Tony Harthoorn. It is best to do it this way as I was doing a lot of the shooting, particularly here during the last recording on the big male. I notice that Tony has been using some big words and I can just see you scrambling for the medical dictionary and the Webster’s Unabridged.

Transcription also offered the unusual opportunity for the transcriber to leave notes for Buechner. This is where I found my first audience response.

[October 16, 1962] I heard Mrs. B. say “I think I will try to get down no.” Tell her it was good to hear her voice—sounded quite natural. I have wondered how an active little 7-yr. old could stay still so long. What does Hannele do to occupy her time?

Field books come in a myriad of formats and content, and their creators used them in just as many ways, sometimes for their own memory, but sometimes as a record to be shared. The examples above serve as a reminder that the field notes can be as diverse as their creators. We encourage you to take a look through and see what you find.

Flash! Unidentified Grass Specimen

This photograph is included in the field notes of André Goeldi and part of a collection that includes 36 black-and-white photographs of specimens. André Goeldi was a Brazilian botanist who collected in Pará, Brazil, circa 1913-1920. SIA2012-3905.

The Expedition Documentation Trifecta: Biological Survey of Panama

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project, with contributions from Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator

Ageratum chiriquense (B.L. Rob.) R.M. King & H. Rob. collected by Henri Pittier between Cerro Vaca and Hato del Loro, Panama, during the Biological Survey of Panama Canal Zone. Catalog number: 715729. Image courtesy of NMNH, Department of Botany.

This is the second in a 4 part joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications.

Documentation and specimens from expeditions often end up separated when participants return to their home institutions. The materials’ connections are sometimes inconsistently recorded. Resulting publications can suffer the same fate. These blog posts are snapshots of how these materials are being reunited virtually, through the ongoing work of BHL, FBP, and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

The first example of this online reunion is the Biological Survey of Panama, 1910- 1912. This was an amazing survey, conducted before the completion of the Panama Canal. Panama had not yet been fully surveyed; scientists recognized the potential lost opportunity, if the country was not studied before the Canal irrevocably altered the landscape. Smithsonian and affiliated staff who worked on the survey also developed an ongoing interest in the area as a site for long term collecting and research. This eventually resulted in a relationship with the research station on Barro Colorado Island, now known as Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Yet, if one looks for publications from this important survey, frequently one must read a portion of text to find the relationship.

Field books from the Survey  Catalog records from Field Book Project Field notes of Charles Dwight Marsh in collection RU007260 Catalogs and journals of Edward A. Goldman (USBS) in collections Acc. 12-048 and Acc. 12-443 Catalogs of S. F. Hildebrand (US Bureau of Fisheries) in NMNH, Division of Fishes in collection RU007220 Correspondence and catalogs of Henri Pittier (USDA) at NMNH Main Library from Department of Botany in collection Acc. 12-350 and Smithsonian Institution Archives collection RU000045 Catalog of Albert S. Hitchcock (USDA) at NMNH Main Library from Department of Botany in collection Acc. 12-054 Catalog of William R. Maxon (USNM) at NMNH Main Library from Department of Botany in collection Acc. 12-151

When cataloging field books that result from an expedition, the Field Book Project creates an Encoded Archival Context catalog record to describe the expedition. The record is designed to provide official and variant names for a survey, major dates, participants, locations, and overall description of work completed. Details vary depending on available information. These specifics enable researchers to locate publications, field notes, and images of specimens collected during an expedition, even though the connection is not always explicitly stated in records.

  By knowing who collected, where, and when, we were able to find records for field notes, publications, and specimens for the Survey of the Panama Canal. The Field Book Project’s item level cataloging facilitated the location of field notes from 5 of the 8 leading participants--several of whom were not employees of the US National Museum. We found several examples of digitized publications from original collectors in BHL, in spite of the fact they sometimes appeared a decade after the fieldwork occurred. These details also enabled the locating specimen images, like the one pictured above.

This is by no means an exhaustive search, but the ease with which these were found is heartening. Resources from expeditions like this are frequently documented only in paper or institutional memory. Publications out of copyright have the chance of being digitized by one of several institutions, but the online presence and availability of specimens and field notes (by nature of their uniqueness) requires additional care, time, and expense that many institutions may not have available. We at the Field Book Project are proud to demonstrate how these pieces can be reconnected online. Stay tuned for more expedition highlights.

Published works in BHL Mammals of Panama (with thirty-nine plates) The marine fishes of Panama Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1910 – 1912 Report on the Lepidoptera of the Smithsonian Biological Survey of the Panama Canal Zone A century of trees of Panama The Fishes of the Fresh Waters of Panama Amphibians and Reptiles collected by the Smithsonian Biological Survey of the Panama Canal Zone New species of fishes from Panama Descriptions of New Genera and Species of Microlepidoptera from Panama New Genus and Species of Hymenoptera of the Family Braconidae from Panama From Expeditions organized or Participated in by the Smithsonian Institution in 1910 and 1911 pg. 15-26 A new catalogue of the fresh-water fishes of Panama

Flash! Fairy Tern

Fairy tern, Pacific Ocean, circa 1961-1973. Location unknown, Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program. SIA2011-1369.

Connecting Users with Field Book Content

By Emily Hunter, Field Book Project

This post was adapted from an article originally published in Plant Press, Vol. 16 No. 1 (pdf).

In December, the Field Book Project made thousands of field book records publicly available and searchable through the Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center. After two years of cataloging efforts funded through the Council on Library and Information Resources, records describing over 6,000 individual field books spanning over 500 collections by number of individuals are now online.

In addition to the release of records, The Field Book Project has been promoting field book content via social media sites Flickr and Twitter, as well as here on our blog hosted on TypePad. Social media allows us to reach new audiences and connect in new ways. The Field Book Project blog posted its first article in March 2011; it now has over 200 posts, over 44,000 page views, and more than 100 comments. Blog articles highlighting field book content are posted about twice per week, and generate a substantial amount of traffic. Thank you to our readers for following our activities!

Flickr, a photo-based social media platform, allows us to share images of field book content with an audience that is visually-oriented. The Field Book Project regularly contributes images to the Smithsonian’s Flickr Commons photo stream.

A photo of a previously unknown specimen was posted to Flickr where users quickly identified it. See the original photo here.

Twitter allows the Field Book Project (@FieldBookProj) to reach out on an informal level to a huge community of active content creators in the fields of biodiversity, museums, archives, libraries, natural history, and more. Through this network we have been able to reach individuals who might not have otherwise heard of the Project. Though our Twitter presence is still quite young, Twitter allows us to reach new users, and connect them with links to blog articles, images, and other content.

While increased exposure for our Project is important, engaging with social media is not just about pushing content out towards new audiences. It is also about opening up a dialogue. Over the past two years we’ve worked to bring guest bloggers in to offer their insights on field books. Guests have included Smithsonian staff external to the Field Book Project, as well as colleagues from other museums, schools, and herbaria. Posts contributed by individuals outside of our Project bring new and different perspectives, questions, and ideas, and help all of us better understand the potential of field books.

Flickr and Twitter also expand the conversation around field books. On Flickr, users can tag images, “favorite” them, add them to galleries, and comment. Comments range from appreciation to questions about the collections to identifications of specimens. Via Twitter, users can ask us questions, give us feedback, and share our content with others.

As the Project moves forward, it’s more important than ever to promote the fruits of our cataloging labors. The public release of field book records not only makes it easier for Smithsonian staff to find related field book content, it opens up our collections to a much broader, international audience. Promoting our content via social media outlets promotes awareness of field books as research resources and opens up a dialogue about field book content. We encourage you to join in and to follow us!

Flash! Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition of 1909

Giraffe specimen being collected in the field by a hunter and assistants.  The hunter may be Teddy Roosevelt. From a hand-painted lantern slide documenting the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition of 1909. SIA2011-1412.

Celebrating 200 Blog Posts with Staff Favorites

Today we are celebrating another Field Book Project milestone: our 200th blog post. Since our first post in March 2011, the project has featured regular posts by staff, interns, volunteers, and guest bloggers. We decided to take a cue from our friends over at Smithsonian Collections Blog who recently celebrated their 500th post by highlighting some of their favorites. We were intrigued by this idea of reflection, and decided to try it ourselves.  We asked Field Book Project staff members and advisors, “What past blog post is near and dear to you and why?” Below, you’ll find their responses.

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Notes from the Field, by Scott Thybony

Image courtesy of Scott Thybony.

I love the Field Book Project blog. It is hard to pick one favorite because I have so many favorite stories told through this blog. But I am choosing to highlight this particular entry by Scott Thybony, a guest blogger, who wrote a wonderful vignette about the human side of field work. This resonates with me because I have always been curious about how it felt to be out in the field pioneering new territory and making notes about the daily finds and the trials and tribulations that come with field work. A humanist by nature, I appreciate the extraordinary work that scientists and explorers have done to help us better understand our world. So, this blog touched me and made me wish I had written something like it. Perhaps I will.

- Anne Van Camp, Director, Smithsonian Institution Archives & Co-PI, Field Book Project

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Toumey and the Tonto Basin: A Tale of a Field Book, Ranching, and 19th Century Ecological Devastation & The Continuing Saga of the Tonto Basin, by Janelle Winters

Selecting my favorite blog post from among the many outstanding contributions by both our staff and outside colleagues is an unfair request. Every one of them has been thoughtfully composed and artfully written. But, since I’m not being allowed to beg out that way, I have chosen “one” that speaks to many issues that inspired the Field Book Project. Janelle Winters was a summer intern from Yale, who worked on a project for me involving historic plant specimens from Arizona. Her two-part blog post (see how I did that) first sprang from this project. The result was a beautiful story that blended westward expansion, dramatic landscape changes, and personal history. This story exemplifies what I like to say about field books … that they are scientifically irreplaceable as well as highly personal.

-Rusty Russell, Programs Director for Collections & Informatics, Department of Botany, NMNH & Co-PI, Field Book Project

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Sharing Culture through Plants, by Sonoe Nakasone

One of my favorite posts explores the ethnobotanical field notes created by William Fisher while he was working as a tidal recorder in Alaska in 1899. It’s always inspiring when we come across the field notes of citizen scientists and other enthusiasts who avidly devote their free time to collecting or observing nature for scientific study. What I really enjoy about the post though is how Sonoe Nakasone, the post’s author, leads us through some precursory research into how Fisher’s notes on medicinal and food uses of collected plants line up with some contemporary resources available online. It’s fascinating to browse through some of these resources and learn about possible uses for local fauna in your area or to do a little research on medicinal uses for plants passed down through your own family. Potatoes for treating burns? Anyone?

-Carolyn Sheffield, Project Manager, Field Book Project

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Butterfly Vision: Robert E. Silberglied’s Photographic Explorations, by Emily Hunter

Toumey and the Tonto Basin: A Tale of a Field Book, Ranching, and 19th Century Ecological Devastation, by Janelle Winters

Choose just one? Can’t! My two-ish: Tonto Basin series parts 1 and 2 by guest blogger Janelle Winters and Butterfly Vision by colleague Emily Hunter. The Tonto Basin series illustrates how information in field books can be pieces of larger stories—in this case a poignant one of ecological destruction. Winters also reminds us that field notes are windows into our past. Butterfly Vision was possibly the most original article we’ve posted. Hunter presents one of the most compelling examples of photographs as field notes, while giving equal weight to the biological and engineering accomplishments of her subject Robert Silberglied.

-Sonoe Nakasone, Cataloging Coordinator, Field Book Project

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Like Son, Like Father; Like Father, Like Son, by Sonoe Nakasone

One of my favorite blog posts was Like Son, Like Father; Like Father, Like Son, about Edgar Alexander Mearns and his son, Louis di Zerega Mearns. It is not uncommon that the collectors whose work we catalog have familial connections in the sciences. In some cases they come to their careers through a spouse, sibling, or parent. However there are not a lot of examples in the field books demonstrating the familial relationship between the scientists while in the field. I found it very touching to read about the father and son’s close friendship and mutual respect.

- Lesley Parilla, Cataloger and Graphics Designer, Field Book Project

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Glorious Day! Or A Bird Watcher’s Field Notes, by Sonoe Nakasone

My favorite blog post is Sonoe Nakasone’s story about James Eike, the bird-watching citizen scientist. Eike’s notes have such a personal touch that you don’t often find among the pages of specimen descriptions in other field books. It is hard not to get sucked into his field books because they occasionally read more like a diary than a list of bird observations. I think the fact that his field books spanned over 30 years of his life made it so that by the end, I felt sad to read about his death, and touched by his wife and daughter finishing out the book.

- Kira Cherrix, Image and Video Digitization Specialist, Smithsonian Institution Archives

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The Boys of Summer, by Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie

Photo courtesy of Northeast Harbor Library.

I loved guest-blogger Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie’s post The Boys of Summer. MacKenzie has a unique perspective on how historical field documentation is relevant to contemporary research; she studies climate and land use change on Mount Desert Island, Maine, and uses field notes in her research. The fascinating twist is this—the field notes she consulted were written by Harvard undergrad students on summer vacation, and yet, provide rich data for comparing to present day observations. Early citizen science!

-Emily Hunter, Cataloger and Social Media Coordinator, Field Book Project

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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]

The Challenge of Collecting Biodiversity

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Portion of the fish collected through rotenone sampling off the coast of Matiti Island, Tikahau, 1957. SIA RU007231, Box 134, Folder "SI-Bredin Society Island Expedition, 1957". SIA2012-0652a.

As a cataloger with a liberal arts background working on a natural sciences project, I have learned a sizeable amount on the job. Some of this knowledge has been about the basics of scientific specialties but, more often than not, my new knowledge has been about the practical side of collecting.

• What kind of information do scientists of a specialization look for? For instance, ornithologists record the stomach contents when listing details about birds collected.
• How are specimens prepared? Stored? Shipped? I had not realized that for mammals collected, in some cases, only the skin was kept. Specimens like fish are often stored in jars of preservative solutions, that incidentally causes them to lose their color.

While working on a collection of Invertebrate Zoology, I came across a practical solution to a question I had not thought to ask – how would one collect a representative moment of biodiversity of a location?  How does one document the fauna of a location as a snap-shot? Thinking over the methods of collecting and observations I have cataloged, I began to see the extent of the challenge.

For birds, I have seen materials for bird counts, bird-banding, and individual collecting.  For marine biology, I have seen materials relating to dredging and fishing. These methods really seem best suited to documenting a type of wildlife found at a location. To use these methods to record a wide range of wildlife in an area would be time and labor intensive.

One method that provides an answer to this challenge is “rotenone sampling.” The account I read in the field notes described it as a relatively new method for collecting a “snapshot” of the fauna of a coral reef. Having never heard of this method, I did some research, and found more than I ever expected.

Rotenone is derived from the roots of tropical plants in the genus Derris, Lonchocarpus or Tephrosia in South America and Pacific Islands. It was initially recognized being used by native populations of the Pacific Islands and South America for fishing purposes. Rotenone works by blocking the cellular uptake of oxygen, and is an example of the use of plant poisons as a way of collecting specimens that are representative of a specific location. This method became more common after 1930. Rotenone is now an established method of location sampling and fish population management.

Over the last half century rotenone has become a collecting tool for field biologists as well as a method of fish management for a variety of organizations including state fish and wildlife departments and federal agencies. As one might imagine, this method of population management and sampling is closely regulated, and has inspired lively debate over the years. Yet over the last half century, state and federal agencies including the EPA have monitored it, and US Fish and Wildlife have discussed its proper utilization, proving it to be a useful tool for environmental study and management.

The Method

By Christina V. Fidler, Museum Archivist, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Joseph Grinnell with Skull, 1930, by G.E. Hoover, http://arctos.database.museum/media/10008377

“The Journal, written in pen at the end of every day, would be considerably fuller and neater, her notes organized, sorted out, edited, expanded, with detailed observations of behavior recorded at the back, on separate pages for each individual species. For the Journal, and for Species Accounts, she created a narrative, free of sentiment or much personal reflection—a scientific document, not a diary, but with the skeleton of facts dressed in the clothes of complete sentences, so as to be readable by any stranger looking over her shoulder. All manner of facts might prove important to a student of the future, this was Grinnell's belief. Nothing in nature should be assumed insignificant.”

Much has been written about Joseph Grinnell’s methodical standard for taking notes, better known as the Grinnell method, but the fictional short story written by Molly Gloss is probably my favorite. It’s titled, The Grinnell Method. I can’t resist the romantic interpretation of Grinnell’s perfected method. I especially love how the Grinnell method is the constant, the order behind this protagonist’s wandering life.

Robert C. Stebbins illustrated field notes, 1947 http://bscit.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mvz_volume_query?special=page&scan_directory=v1626_s6&section_order=6&page=57&orig_query=459936.

The Grinnell Method is a comprehensive approach to recording observations and activity in the field and is recognized internationally as a standard in field note taking. Field notes consist of the Journal, Species Accounts, and the Catalogue. Maps, drawings and photos of localities and specimens are expected. Grinnell had standardized the method by 1908, when he was established as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California Berkeley (MVZ). His earlier field notebooks contain similar header information as outlined by the method but the standard sized paper and headers aren't consistent until 1908. The museum still follows the method today, including the paper size.

From an archives perspective, the uniformity of the data makes it easier to catalog geographic locations and more importantly, the historic field notes have been the foundation for resurveys conducted by the MVZ. You can learn more about the Grinnell Method on the MVZ website.

The majority of the MVZ archival collections consist of field notes. As I'm sure the Field Book Project can attest to, working with field notes is both fascinating and complex. There is a wealth of data stored in and related to the pages bound (or unbound) in the notebooks. One focus of the MVZ’s three-year Hidden Collections grant from the Council for Library and Information Resources is to try to link our existing resources to our archival finding aids in a dynamic and new way.

The MVZ has a number of field notes scanned as part of an earlier grant. They are located on the MVZ Field Notebook site. Additionally, the MVZ utilizes Arctos, a multi-institutional specimen database, to manage its specimen collections in addition to other data related to collecting events. Because our data are available online, I can link them through various finding aid notes. Primarily I utilize the Related Archival Materials note and the Existence of Copies note. The Charles H. Richardson finding aid is an example of how a finding aid can incorporate references to specimen data and digitized material.

Screenshot of how finding aid notes are used to link materials.

We are still perfecting our own methods for making these connections. We’re also looking at ways in which Arctos can link back to the finding aid for a two-way match. This is just the start of the grant and I hope that future developments include more innovative ways of bringing all of the data together.

Readers can keep up with the MVZ Hidden Collections Project by visiting the MVZ Archives blog.


References
Gloss, Molly. “The Grinnell Method.” Strange Horizons. September 3, 2012. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2012/20120903/grinnell-f.shtml.

Related Links
http://books.google.com/books?id=GiADAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA163&ots=30WFxwp-Xh&dq=The%20Methods%20and%20Uses%20of%20a%20Research%20Museum&pg=PA164#v=onepage&q&f=false (The Methods and Uses of a Research Museum, by Joseph Grinnelll)

http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/1977AFN.PDF (On Taking Field Notes, by James V.  Remsen Jr.)

http://gk12calbio.berkeley.edu/lessons/fieldnoteguide.pdf (Guide used in UC Berkeley’s IB104 class)

The Digital Specimen, Field Book, and Publication Trifecta

Burying Members of the Franklin Expedition at Starvation Cove, c. 1924. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Science Service Records, RU 007091, Box 409, Folder 2. 2005-8639.

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project, with contributions from Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator

The Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) are pleased to bring you a joint blog series showcasing some of the best examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications for three notable expeditions. This four part series will continue over the coming months. Ever wonder what it takes to understand the full story of historical expedition science? Read on!

It’s safe to say, everyone has an idea of what an expedition is; I hope all will agree when I say they are fascinating. Expeditions can be a thrilling story of exploration, national pride, thrill-seeking, and personal drama. They have been organized for a myriad of political or personal reasons; whatever these may have been, expeditions frequently yield natural history observations and specimens. Expeditions are also a wonderful source of information about biodiversity. Since expedition participants usually come from multiple institutions and disciplines, more collecting is often possible. This can result in a specimen collection of greater breadth and variety than a typical collecting event. With these characteristics, an expedition can prove a fascinating story and an important source of scientific documentation.

So I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to look at the Field Book Project’s expedition content. FBP was inspired by the challenges a researcher experienced tracking down specimens and field books from an expedition. Those experiences helped shape the cataloging structure FBP developed. We create catalog records for field books, their collections, and their creators (persons, organizations, and expeditions). Since we started, we have cataloged field books from 103 expeditions, some involving well-known individuals or documenting the first time an area was thoroughly studied.

Theodore Roosevelt on African Expedition, 1909. Smithsonian Institution Archives, RU 00095, Box 56, Folder 10. SIA2009-1371.

On December 19th, FBP catalog records were made available through the Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center. This has created what I like to think of as the trifecta. What constitutes the trifecta? There are three major parts to natural history documentation that have proven important to researchers with whom we’ve worked: (1) the specimens, (2) the field books created when specimens were collected, and (3) the publications that resulted from their study. The Smithsonian Institution maintains online databases for many of their specimens. As BHL blog readers know, Smithsonian Libraries has also contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library to provide digitized versions of the publications for free access online. The FBP now offers online descriptions of the individual primary documents. The trifecta is growing for a number of Smithsonian sponsored expeditions and collecting events. A researcher now has a better chance of locating a specimen, its related field book, and a publication that cites it.

As a Field Book Project cataloger, I am thrilled to see the last element of the trifecta, our records, now available. While cataloging, we often verify information like location names by searching for digitized publications the creator may have written based on the field books. I find it fascinating to see how a publication can be informed by a primary document and vice versa. A researcher may be able to determine what a creator saw as significant about the collecting through the publication, and see the day-to-day work that the creator used to come to that conclusion in the field book.

Researching an Expedition

Reid Inlet, Glacier Bay 1899. Taken during the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU 007243 Box 1, Folder 2. 1558_Image_RU7243_Box1_Harriman-13.

What is so challenging about researching specimens and documentation from a historical expedition? When an expedition ends, it can eventually fall from the public consciousness. The specimens and documentation might then be divided. At the very least, specimens go to each institution whose staff collected it. Specimens and documentation may be separated again by type and sent to different departments within an institution (e.g. mammal specimens go to mammalogy, bird specimens to ornithology). The fact that they were collected during the same expedition may not be recorded with each handoff. Each separation makes it harder to guarantee that the expedition connection is still evident.

Publications resulting from expeditions also run a high risk of losing an explicit expedition connection. Book catalog records do not always indicate that a publication documents a certain expedition. A researcher looking for resulting publications might have to search for participants as authors, looking for a period of time after the expedition was completed, then read the publication itself to verify the content is relevant.

Some of these issues, like discovery of expedition related publications, may seem pretty straightforward, but this type of search assumes that the researcher knows who took part in the expedition.

How expeditions are documented

Expedition documentation varies widely. In recent years, some universities and museums have used the general appeal of expeditions to highlight some of their own collections online. These can be wonderfully informative websites, but usually only cover a few expeditions of significance to the home institution.

The Smithsonian Institution, as part of its initiative to be a provider of public history, has a detailed list of Smithsonian related expeditions available as an online guide that covers 1878 – 1917, compiled from Smithsonian Annual Reports. The Institution’s annual reports have a long tradition of discussing any major fieldwork. Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) also maintains more than 150 individual expedition records. These records are at varied levels of completeness, since Annual Reports sometimes only mention the name of a collecting effort if it was small.

Over the last two years, FBP has documented 103 expeditions relating to field notes. Several were not in the extensive list already kept by SIA, but deeply buried in personal or departmental papers. These can be rich resources, but a researcher would usually not know the information was there without reading the materials, despite the detailed finding aids SIA generates every year.

Researching an expedition is like untangling a very large knot. FBP, BHL, and museum divisions work to increase online documentation so researchers can find the right string to pull. This is by no means a finished process; many of us know what a gnarly tangle the search through materials can become. The digitization of the specimen, field book, and publication trifecta can only serve to ease the burden of this twisted ravel of biology, personal history and published record, helping us and our researchers to find the connections.

Reflections or Sayonara Sonoe

By Sonoe Nakasone, Cataloging Coordinator, Field Book Project

It was a sweltering hot summer afternoon when the phone, weak from the D.C. heat, gave a woozy ring.

“Alright, kid, you’re in.  You start Monday.”  It was the voice of Tammy Peters, Supervisory Archivist at Smithsonian Institution Archives.  “Bring your smarts, kid, ‘cause you’re gonna need ‘em.” *Click.*

Surprised, I stood like stone clenching the phone, dial tone droning in the background after Tammy hung up.  “Cataloging Coordinator,” I thought.  “This should be interesting.”

My first few days working for the Field Book Project flew by in a blur until the day Carolyn Sheffield, Project Manager, decided it was time for an initiation.  On that day, she led me deep into the bowels of the National Museum of Natural History through a dark winding hall.  We were half way between the ocean floor and the earth’s core when I saw a light beckon from our destination: The Botany and Horticulture Library. 

“You get used to the walk,” she smirked.

We crept along the stacks until we reached the rows where field books lay each as strange as the next.  I saw one with at least two other books bound inside it.  Another was as large as an elephant and filled with photos.  Others were small enough to fit into a mouse’s breast pocket.  The writing in some was as intricate and decorative as a medieval manuscript, and in others, scratchier than a chicken’s claws.  Within the first five minutes of this journey, I could tell smooth sailing wasn’t ahead.

*             *             *

Okay, so it didn’t really happen like that, but I did become Cataloging Coordinator on the Field Book Project in the uncomfortably hot summer of 2010.  At that time, we had zero catalog records and agreements with only the Department of Botany and the Smithsonian Institution Archives to catalog field books.  But we also had the hope and the inspiring vision of our Principle Investigators Rusty Russell and Anne Van Camp that if we built it—by “it” we mean the workflows, cataloging infrastructure, and Field Book Registry—they would come.

Field Book Project Team, 2012

And they did.  We now have nearly 7,000 item level records from the Departments of Botany and Entomology, the Divisions of Birds, Fishes, and Mammals, Smithsonian Libraries, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives.  In addition to our item records, we have records describing the collections these items belong to and records describing the persons, organizations, and expeditions that created the field notes.

Two and a half years has not only brought about the realization of our cataloging goals, we’ve also enjoyed sharing with our supporters what we learn from the field notes through our blog, Flickr, Twitter, and our Website.  This has enabled us to form partnerships and develop educational and outreach opportunities we wouldn’t have otherwise.

As interesting as the individual stories that each field book tells are, what I find far more compelling is the overarching story of access to information and building bridges between similar and related information.  Although I will no longer be working for the Field Book Project, I look forward to seeing great things to come, for example, crowdsourcing and the Semantic Web. 

With so much information and so few resources to make sense of it, crowdsourcing is the way to go.  “Citizen Scientists” and enthusiasts can transcribe digitally imaged field notes to make them keyword searchable for researchers.  Transcription also enables tools like Taxon Finder to identify and tag scientific names in the field books or similar tools to recognize geographic names and entity names (e.g. persons, organizations, and expeditions).  Once these names are recognized, other tools can be built to link those names to existing information (like in Encyclopedia of Life or SNAC) on the web or prompt visitors to annotate transcriptions (e.g. So You Think You Can Digitize), geotag, or create an authority record for entities.  Data visualizations such as mappings, word graphs, time lines, and many others will also be made easier by transcription and crowdsourcing.  Such visualizations present the data in a way that is easy to grasp at a glance, but also allows us to see trends and relationships we might not otherwise see.  

From my favorite field book collection: Constantine S. Rafinesque's Notes N. 17, pages 64 and 65, 1818, RU 007250. SIA2012-6075.

There is also potential for the Field Book Project metadata to become part of the Semantic Web.  Natural Collections Description (NCD), which FBP uses for collection level descriptions, and Metadata Objects Description Schema (MODS), which FBP uses for item level data, are being enhanced with  Research Description Framework (RDF), one of the key components of the Semantic Web.   In a nutshell, the use of the RDF data model will enable connections between data from different schemas, platforms, and applications.  More information on RDF is found at http://www.w3.org/RDF/.

Needless to say, I’ll be keeping an eye on the exciting things happening here at the Field Book Project, and I hope you will too because this project is Seriously Amazing.

That said, perhaps I should exit the way I came…

*             *             *

As the sun set on a cold February Friday, its gold-red light blanketed my badge, lying stoically on my empty desk.  I picked up my box of things and headed for the door.  A sound from behind made me turn.  It was Tammy’s footsteps as she walked out of her office slowly.  With half her mouth smiling and a twinkle in her eye she said, “You did good, kid.  You did good.”

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]

Flash! Laysan Albatross Courtship

Illustration of two Laysan albatrosses displaying courtship behavior, artist unknown, Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program, 1961-1973. SIA2011-1357.

Field Books of the Secretaries

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Last August, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, contributed a guest blog post discussing the legacy of field research at the Smithsonian. He touched on his own background of field work when he was a professor. My curiosity was piqued by the post. The Smithsonian has a long history of field research; is this also to be found in the careers of past Secretaries? I knew that many of the Smithsonian Secretaries, especially among the first, were scientists. How many other Smithsonian Secretaries personally shared in this legacy of field research, and consequently had created field notes?

You might wonder why I find this point of field research completed by Smithsonian Secretaries to be so important. It stems from the fact that the Smithsonian, in profound ways, has been shaped by the people who run it. It was founded with a laudable but vague mission to, “increase and diffuse knowledge among men.” It could have fulfilled this in many ways—as a national library, university, observatory, to name a few. There were a multitude of options, and from the very beginning officials at the Smithsonian endeavored to shape it into a cohesive entity to fulfill this mission. Their interests guided Smithsonian collections, and their professional associations shaped long term relationships with federal agencies as well as the public. Secretaries, especially in the early years of the Smithsonian, were fundamental in determining how the institution completed its mission.

When one looks through the backgrounds of the Secretaries, it is telling that the majority of them came from a scientific background, and that many of the earliest worked in natural history. 10 out of the last twelve Secretaries have a background in the sciences.

• Joseph Henry: Secretary 1846 - 1878 (physics)
• Spencer Fullerton Baird: Secretary 1878 - 1887 (ornithology, ichthyology)
• Samuel Pierpont Langley: Secretary 1887 - 1906 (astrophysics)
• Charles Doolittle Walcott: Secretary 1907 - 1927 (paleontology)
• Charles Greeley Abbot: Secretary 1928 - 1944 (astrophysics)
• (Frank) Alexander Wetmore: Secretary 1945 - 1954 (ornithology, avian paleontology)
• Leonard Carmichael: Secretary 1953 - 1964 (experimental psychology with primates)
• S. Dillon Ripley: Secretary 1964 - 1984 (ornithology)
• Robert McCormick Adams: Secretary 1984 - 1994 (archaeology and anthropology)
• G. Wayne Clough: Secretary since 2008 (civil engineering)

So where are the field books of the Smithsonian Secretaries? I have cataloged several collections of field notes from Smithsonian Secretaries, but several possible collections of Secretaries’ field notes seem conspicuously absent. This kind of search seems to be an ongoing theme for several of our blog posts. It highlights one of my favorite aspects of archives. Archival materials are unique, primary documents and are the product of a creator in a specific place and time. My rather esoteric statement simply means that a person’s papers usually reside in a location that makes sense with when and where the materials were created. A researcher frequently must know where a creator worked and studied to figure out what organization houses the creator’s materials. Additionally, in some cases, a creator will donate his personal papers to an institution that had special meaning to him. If you search for the field notes of Smithsonian Secretaries, you’ll see what I mean. Smithsonian frequently has the field books of the earliest Secretaries, because they were often closely affiliated with the Smithsonian for decades before taking the post as its head. Many of them worked with government agencies like US Geological Survey or US Department of Agriculture that worked closely with Smithsonian departments. Later Secretaries did not always have the same kind of long term relationship with the Institution prior to accepting the position. Thus, their field notes are with alma maters, favored institutions, or societies like American Philosophical Society who holds the papers of Leonard Carmichael.

The Smithsonian has a wonderful legacy in scientific field work that is demonstrated even in the personal endeavors of individuals who led the institution. It is a legacy that we at the Field Book Project are pleased to support.

To learn more about the history of the Smithsonian Secretaries, we encourage you to visit the Smithsonian Institution Archives website.

Flash! Disembarking, San José, Guatemala

Disembarking, San San José, Guatemala. Photograph taken by Mary Agnes Chase or A. S. Hitchcock, documenting field work, circa 1898-1903. SIA2012-4621.

Lost and Found: Book Curses and Positive Reinforcement

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Field Book of A. H. Howell, housed in the Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History. howell_a_h_192504-192506-1.

When I was in graduate school earning my MLIS, one of my favorite courses was on the history of books. One of the more memorable lectures in the class was on illuminated manuscripts and the book curses sometimes written in them. Scribes worked in difficult conditions for months or years at a time to create one-of-a-kind works. As a result, sometimes scribes would write warnings in the books, to discourage individuals from stealing or harming the labor-intensive creations.

The idea of a curse to protect one's texts appears to go back millenia.  One of the oldest known curses comes from the library at Ninevah, c. 668 to 627 BCE:

I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who have gone before me had learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land.

There are few modern works comparable to the medieval texts, but these warnings came to mind when I found notes in some of field books to those who might find or otherwise come into possession of them. Most of these notes look to use positive reinforcement. For example, some offer rewards. Lester F. Ward who worked for the US Geological Survey, wrote in the front cover of his field book (October 29, 1893 to June 4, 1897):

Two dollars reward will be paid to anyone returning this book, if lost, to Lester F. Ward, U.S. Geological Survey, Washington D.C.

Other field books, like those of the US Biological Survey, were issued with return postage on a perforated sheet, so someone could simply mail it back postage paid.

Page from field book of Gary L. Ranck in Iran, 1962–1963. Housed at the Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History.

When reading these notes in the field books, I remember learning about the amount of time and conditions in which the medieval scribes worked. They also remind me of quotes in the field books about swarms of insects, adverse weather, and difficult travel conditions. Field books may not be as visually arresting, but they often document the same level of effort, time, and dedication. So if you have the opportunity to handle one, please handle with care.

Flash! Barbour, Wortman, and Gidley

Erwin Hinckley Barbour, J.L. Wortman, and James William Gidley on paleontological expedition. Circa 1900-1935. SIA2011-1415.

Something Fishy

By Sonoe Nakasone, Field Book Project

Blunt-nosed Sucker, July 28th, 1886, Verde, Arizona.  SIA RU 7184. Courtesy of the Division of Fishes, National Musem of Natural History.

It seems I’ve already said quite a bit about Edgar Alexander Mearns (1856-1916), the naturalist who collected birds, mammals, plants—you name it—throughout  the US, Philippines, northern Mexico, and Kenya.  My article on the Brachypteryx and last year’s Father’s Day post presented glimpses of Mearns as both a collector and person.  But Mearns was so prolific a naturalist, so fascinating a person, that I can’t help but return to his collections.  This time, let’s talk about fish.

Mearns’s notes seem to crop up everywhere, so I wasn’t surprised to see his familiar name written across a box in the Division of Fish this summer.  I greeted the box with the familiarity of an old friend, but upon opening it, was met with the cold grip of a stranger, for in the box was something completely new to me: fish tracings.  According to Jeff Williams, Collections Manager (Division of Fish, NMNH), tracing fish was not a standard protocol before, during, or after Mearns’s time.  So what prompted Mearns to step outside the box?

Traced dorsal anterior. 1886?  SIA RU 7184. Courtesy of the Division of Fishes.

Before attempting to answer this question, let me tell you more about these fish tracings.  There are 12 tracings of fish included in this collection.  It seems Mearns plopped a fish down, outlined it, and then filled in a few details like big round eyes that make the traced mouths look like cartoonish smiles.   An impressive detail included is the accurate rendering of the fishes’ tails and fins, which it seems he obtained by covering these parts with ink and stamping them onto the fish outline.  Clever, Mearns, very clever.  And creative.  The result of this tracing and stamping is a rudimentary, yet accurate “sketch” of a fish.

Brook trout from Camp Douglass, Jun, August 20, 1890.  SIA RU 7184. Courtesy of the Division of Fishes.

We’ve explored the importance of drawings and sketches of specimens in field notes, especially for fish, on this blog before.  We’ve learned from my colleague, Lesley Parilla, that color sketches of fish in the field are particularly important because the fish’s color fades soon after it dies.  Some fish sketches, therefore, have a more “finished” look than one might expect from a field sketch.  Similarly, I wondered if Mearns’s hasty trace and stamp job captured information lost after his fish were preserved.

Williams thinks it’s likely that Mearns traced his fish in order to obtain a quick measurement of the fish.  Accompanying Mearns’s tracings are many pages of detailed fish measurements of every kind.  These measurements, however, were most likely taken from preserved specimens.  Williams notes that although shrinkage varies by species, preserving fish in alcohol can see a 1-10% decrease in size from the time the specimen was alive.  The difference is notable in the length measurement, perhaps several millimeters in difference.  It’s possible Mearns’s tracings were a means to ascertain an exact measurement before his specimens shrunk.

Richardsonius gibbosus.  Circa July 2 (no year), Cedar Creek, Arizona.  SIA RU 7184. Courtesy of the Division of Fishes.

What about the tail and fin stamps?  What purpose would that have served when the specimens' tails and fins were to be preserved?  Unfortunately, I have no real answer to this question, although my uneducated guess is that it served as a quick reference for tail and fin patterns.  As for what inspired Mearns in the first place, one clue may come from Japanese Gyotaku, which as Jeff Williams notes, bears similarities to the stamping aspect of Mearns's tracings.  Although Gyotaku eventually developed into an art form, it originated as tool for fishermen to document the size and physical attributes of their day's catch.  Could Mearns have been emulating the methods of Japanese fishermen? 

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention.  Although Mearns did not invent the technique of tracing fish, Mearns’s fish tracings may serve as a testament to his creativity and resourcefulness in solving the problem of quickly and accurately obtaining measurements and pattern information of fresh fish.  Ah, Mearns, is there anything you can’t do?!

 

Thanks to Kris Murphy and Jeff Williams for their assistance with this article.

Flash! Laysan teal

Laysan teal, Laysan Island, June 14, 1966. Philip C. Shelton. SIA2011-1353.

National Handwriting Day: The Results Are In!

Thank you to all who voted for the 2013 Field Book Handwriting Award! We received 76 votes in the short time the survey was posted, and the handwriting sample of Martin M. Moynihan emerged as the clear winner! See more examples of Moynihan’s lovely cursive writing below.

Best in Show: Martin H. Moynihan

#6 Martin H. Moynihan. Moynihan’s field notes include behavioral observations of Cyanerpes, Panama, 1958. Read more about Moynihan here. From Acc. 01-096. SIA2012-1880.

From Acc. 01-096. SIA2012-1914.	From Acc. 01-096. SIA2012-1929.

Second place went to the elegant 19^th century script of Frederick Kreutzfeldt.  Arthur Stelfox’s neat printing came in third. A sizeable group of scribblers stood in solidarity with the messy hand of Waldo Schmitt.

You can see all of the contenders here. Thanks again for your participation and Happy National Handwriting Day!

Mapping Edward A. Chapin’s Field Work

By Eleonore Dixon-Roche

Most of us have looked at maps, diagrams and various pictorial forms of communication without much thought as to how that image came to be. We take for granted the visual aids that are handed to us without much thought to the process of how they got there. Maps are a wonderful form of pictorial communication. They possess the beauty of something that we inherently understand with an overlay of information. They can be as simple as showing the terrain, to showing the diversity of species in a given area. It seems so evident that when an explorer comes back from a voyage and has a list of coordinates from collection sites that a map is called for. Looking over a list of locations can be quite a vapid experience for the casual reader, but a visual aid such as a map can offer some stimulation and help in spatial understanding.

The Field Book Project has vast amounts of information from the trips researchers have taken in the field. Although it is impractical to include every bit of information in a field book in a single map, it can give instant insight into the places they have been and some reason as to why, without having to read through pages of descriptions. Researchers often need to read through vast amounts of literature in order to find needed information. A map distills that information, because let’s face it, how many times have you been searching for something and gone instantly to Google Images instead of reading the lengthy article?

The years in and around 1939-1945 meant a time of war and tragedy for most of the world. Chapin's travels are a useful reminder that even in a time of war, research and travels continue. This map is a short visual overview of the destinations that he went to on his search for entomological specimens. At that time, travel whether in wartime or not, was neither the easiest nor the most comfortable. However, Chapin covered considerable ground over about a decade. This map focuses on the variety of his travel sites.

I wanted to create a map, at my Scientific Illustration program at California State University, Monterey Bay, that showed the extensive travels that researchers take and Chapin was an excellent example. In order to create this map without breach of copyright and to tailor to one’s specific needs, I took a base map open to the public and traced it in Adobe Illustrator. An icon for location points, a scale, and compass are indispensable in a map. The design itself is intended to have the feel of a field book.

Eleonore was an intern with National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany, 2012, and contributed a post discussing her work with the maps of botanist Joseph Nelson Rock.

For more information about the Edward A. Chapin’s field notes, check out collections SIA Acc. 11-085 and SIA Acc. 12-446 on Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center.

Cast Your Vote for the 2013 Field Book Handwriting Award

By Emily Hunter, Field Book Project

Break out your quills! As you may (or may not) know, National Handwriting Day is quickly approaching on January 23rd. Sonoe Nakasone posted last year at this time about this important national holiday, selecting Steven J. Arnold as the recipient of the Field Book Project 2012 penmanship award. This year, I’d like to introduce you to a few types of handwriting that we come across in field books. We’ve narrowed down to a few selections to represent each category. However, we invite YOU to help us choose a Best in Show.

The Graceful Script

The graceful script hearkens back to a day when beautiful penmanship was respected. We appreciate the time it took these collectors to dip their quills and make those even, careful loops and dips. Both of our candidates were chosen because their script is not just visually interesting, but also legible.

#1  E. A. Goldman.  Goldman’s pretty cursive hand in cyan ink is just delightful in this field book from Mexico, describing mammals and birds he collected there in 1893. From SIA RU 007364. SIA 2012-1441. [click image for larger view]

#2  Frederick Kreutzfeldt. Kreutzfeldt’s penmanship didn’t suffer even while recording in less-than-ideal circumstances. This account was made during his participation in the Survey of the Northwest Boundary along the 38th and 39th Parallels, 1853, and may be the last entry before he died (read more about that in a previous blog post). We admire his perfect line spacing and delicate calligraphic slant. From SIA RU 007157. SIA2011-2257. [click image for larger view]

The Utilitarian Print

What a relief to the tired eyes of a cataloger, to view the nice clean text of a hand-printed field book entry. So easy to read! We chose the two candidates below for being so meticulous and neat.

#3 James A. Peters. Peters, a herpetologist, has a contemporary petite all-caps printing style. The entry above is from Peters’s collecting trip to Mexico in 1949. Read more about the field notes of James A. Peters in a previous blog post here. From SIA RU007175.  SIA2012-6213. [click image for larger view]

#4  Arthur Stelfox.  Nice printing in this index by Arthur Stelfox, from his field notes on mollusca, 1911. From SIA RU 007379 . SIA2012-1436. [click image for larger view]

The Highly Stylized

This type of writing is always a treat to read, as it always seems to reveal something of the creator’s personality. The highly stylized hand can be full of over-the-top flourishes and exaggerated slants (either left or right). Some are round and bulbous, others are jaunty, others long and lean. Overall, we appreciate the variety of this category.

#5 Edward Palmer. Ethnobotanist Edward Palmer has a heavy calligraphic hand, with larger-than-average sized letters and some interesting flourishes. Read more about Palmer in a previous blog post here. From SIA Acc. 12-346. No negative number. [click image for larger view]

#6 Martin H. Moynihan. Moynihan’s writing is quite lyrical with an interesting take on lowercase y's and f's and uppercase T's. Moynihan’s field notes include behavioral observations of Cyanerpes, Panama, 1958. Read more about Moynihan here. From Acc. 01-096. SIA2012-1880. [click image for larger view]

The Nearly Illegible

Let’s be honest. These collectors had bigger fish to fry than neatly writing in their field books. They didn’t waste time dotting i’s and crossing t’s—they got the information down! Whether they were atop a camel, in a helicopter, or off-roading, their handwriting records the necessary information in a way that they (and maybe only they) can read later.

#7 Cleofé E. Calderon. Calderon’s books are full of important contributions to the field of Botany, but they take some skill to decipher. This entry comes from botanical field work in Brazil, 1976. Read more about Cleofé Calderon’s field notes here. From SIA Acc. 12-005. SIA 2012-7486. [click image for larger view]

#8 Waldo LaSalle Schmitt. Schmitt’s field books are fascinating, and yet some of the most difficult to decipher. View photographs from Schmitt’s field work in French Polynesia, Antarctica, and Alaska, 1940-1963, on Flickr. From SIA RU007231. No negative number. [click image for larger view]

Vote for the Field Book Project 2013 Handwriting Award!

As you can see, different handwriting styles can certainly yield different outcomes, and directly affect our own appreciation of the content. We might romanticize the script writing, we can easily read the utilitarian print, we make estimations about the content of those written in the “illegible” style. How can one choose a best in show, when comparing apples to oranges? So, we’d like to open it up to you, dear readers. What do you think? Please cast your vote for one of the field book handwriting samples above, via our Google survey. We’ll share the results via Twitter on National Handwriting Day, January 23, 2013. Thank you for voting!

Vote for your favorite penmanship sample!

Field Books of the Future: What Will We Find?

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

The Field Book Project’s original goal was to catalog an estimated 6,000 field books housed at the National Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian Institution Archives. We have cataloged over 6,700 and are still cataloging. Having surpassed our initial estimate, I began to wonder about the field books we haven’t yet included. The field books we catalog are considered inactive collections, meaning they are no longer worked on and used by their creators. Most of the field books we have cataloged are from prior to 1980. Some of these give fascinating insights into culture and the sciences of the time as well as the personalities of the collectors.

Technology and current events have changed dramatically in the last thirty years. I’ve been contemplating what we might find in field books post-1980. I’ve listed a couple of possibilities below that reflect methods currently being used for field research. I know I can’t put in requests, but here are some of the things I look forward to:

• Transmitters: Scientists at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Patrick Jansen, a scientist at STRI and Wageningen University) have attached radio transmitters to more than 400 seeds to find out how large seeds of tropical trees are dispersed.
• Planes: I am fascinated by the use of aviation in field work. We have found a few references in the field books we’ve cataloged so far. These have mostly discussed aviation as transportation to remote spots, but also surveying for archaeological sites (SIA RU 007006), and studying vegetation zones (SIA Acc. 12-040). C. O. Handley documented the use of aerial surveying of terrain when he conducted fieldwork in the Arctic with the US Navy in the summer of 1948 (SIA Acc. 12-448).
• Submarines: Smithsonian scientists went to Substation Curacao this last summer to use submarines to study and collect marine life from areas to which they rarely have access.
• Robots: There are several field projects recently discussing the use of unmanned vehicles and other technology in field work. NMNH is currently highlighing work completed by Scarlet Knight, the first robotic vessel to cross the Atlantic.  Other institutions, like Scripps Institute of Oceanography, have been using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to study smog in California.
• Outer Space: As we develop the ability to send robots and people to other planets, will we need to record not just what nation but also the planet? Remote field work is being conducted on Mars by NASA’s rover Curiosity as we speak.
• Citizen Scientists: Smithsonian and other institutions sometimes utilize volunteers to complete field work. Ecotourism has led to the institutions creating opportunities for people to do this during vacations. Smithsonian Environmental Research Center wrote about this method of collecting in conjunction with Earthwatch in a 2011 blog post.

Over the course of this project, I have been amazed at the wide variety of field book sources, locations, and content. Where ever the field books come from, we will be happy to catalog them!

Flash! Weddell seals

Ray and Lavallee with Weddell seals at the Palmer Peninsula, Antarctica. Circa 1962. SIA2012-0669.

Specimen Collecting in Unexpected Places

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

When cataloging specimen lists, one might think the content pretty dry. There is usually a collector’s number, specimen type (scientific or common name), age, sex, location information, and perhaps a museum catalog number. You can find much of this in the online database available through the National Museum Natural History website.

However!

Not everything gets transferred from that specimen list, thus the inspiration for this blog post. Location information in the online database usually relates county, state, town, sometimes elevation, and latitude and longitude. I cataloged my first large number of specimen lists while in the Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History. Entries were frequently rudimentary, but some included detailed notes about habitat, time of day, or weather at the time the specimen was collected. Much of that information is not transferred to the online database. Information with that level of specificity is found perhaps exclusively in field notes.

 

Entry states that specimen was “caught in a posthole.” From C. O. Handley’s Mammal catalog, 1935-1947. SIA Acc. 12-448, box 3, housed at the Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History. Photograph by Lesley Parilla.

There were a few of these entries I remember simply for the humor or inexplicability of them. I was so struck by the novelty of their details that I transcribed a few. Below are some of my favorites.

• Eptisicus fuscus, 17 August 1943, Blacksburg, Virginia, “found behind blind on Presbyterian Church” (collected by C. O. Handley)
• Eptesicus F fuscus, 10 July 1929, “caught in my bedroom, 9:00pm” (collected by Leonard Giovannoli)
• [Mammal], 27 May 1924, Reno, Nevada, “in sink at head of cottonwood creek, on sand dune among Artemisia triclemtata?) (collected by E. R. Hall)
• Mephitis m. varians, 15 December 1894, Kiowa County, Colorado, “caught by dead cow” (collected by Clark P. Streator)
• Blarina B., 17 August 1936, Blacksburg, Montgomery county, Virginia, “caught in posthole” (collected by C. O. Handley)
• [Mammal], 22 February 1968, “trapped in kitchen of prison farm at trap site #1. ‘next to brickyard.’ 1.1 km No and 0.2 km west of Con Son town ship, Viet Nam” (collected by M. L. Cunningham)

I also found several references to specimens collected “dead on road.” I can only assume this equates to road-kill. I did a little online research and found that several natural history museums refer to this in the specimen collecting. At first I thought this unusual, but it made me wonder--would this kind of specificity be useful to ongoing research about the effect of roads (especially roads like interstates) on diversity and distribution of wildlife? Studies like these are being conducted by the US Forestry Service.

These unexpected notes give amazingly specific information about collecting locations. Some of the collected specimens relate to the study of zoonotic diseases, like the one collected by Cunningham; knowing that the specimen was collected in a kitchen demonstrates just how closely an animal possibly spreading disease could come to a human population. These listings may seem random and may not get transferred to related databases, but as seen in examples above, their specificity provides a level of detail for which current and future researchers will undoubtedly find a use.

Flash! Collecting grasses

 

Man standing in a field with grasses and trees, possibly André Goeldi in Brazil. Circa 1913-1920. SIA2012-3935.

New Year's Resolutions

By Emily Hunter, Field Book Project

Page from F. A. McClure's Diary Record, January 1, 1941. SIA Acc. T90028, Box 9. No negative number.

Happy New Year from all of us here at the Field Book Project! As people who are constantly reading field notes, it’s hard for us to let a holiday pass without imagining what it was like for scientists who spent their holidays in the field, away from family, continuing to collect and study the specimens they so enjoyed.

New Year’s Day, for many of us, is filled with promise—a new start, a new dream, new resolve to finish our projects, perfect our character flaws, strive to be better human beings. Even field scientists felt this way; they looked up from pressing plants, packing fish, and taking field notes, and resolved to better themselves.

In 1941, Floyd Alonso McClure wrote in his diary,

I started the day off rather badly, considering that it is ‘New Years,’ and that I still consider that I could and should do everything better than I do.

Who hasn’t felt this way about a New Year? He continues,

As I look at this page, it seems that even my handwriting lacks character that statement however, cannot be true, for handwriting surely reveals character—or habit—to a certain extent, at least. Perhaps mine reveals my character more clearly as it is than it would if it were more regular. I believe, however, that the practice of a particular style of writing would have a beneficial effect… I must write more by hand.

As catalogers who spend a good deal of time trying to decipher handwriting, we can’t scoff at that resolution! (As an aside, McClure was being a little rough on himself—his handwriting was not even close to the worst that we’ve seen.) A lighter and simpler resolution might also be a good direction to go. Like this one, that McClure penned on the first day of 1925:

As for New Year’s resolutions, we read at the table at noon the list of twenty which I made out for myself at Nodoa, in Hainan, on the eve of the end of 1921. They still seem to cover the ground fairly well and so we let them stand. In short our resolution is ‘To make the most of life’.

Here we are, over 90 years later, and McClure’s resolution to “make the most of life” still sounds like a good one. We’ll toast to that one. Happy 2013 everyone!

What’s in a Name? Changing Names for Specimen Collecting Efforts

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Kenneth C. Balcomb [POBSP participant] banding a young Black-footed albatross on Laysan Island, June 12, 1966. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU 000245. Image # SIA2011-1359.

My blog posts usually start with a question about field book content. This one started with a question about how to define the entity that created the field books. When we catalog field books, we also create records for the creators: persons, expeditions, or organizations. In this instance, I cataloged a collection and couldn't initially decide if the creator was an organization or an expedition. You'd think this would be easy to figure out, and yet somewhere around the mid-twentieth century, there were significant changes in the way major collecting efforts like expeditions were organized and conducted that required me to rethink whether it still fit our definition of an expedition.

When I first cataloged for the Field Book Project, most of the collections were from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Expeditions of that era sometimes lasted for years. When I began to catalog collections from the early to mid-twentieth century, I noticed that collectors were able to return home periodically during their expeditions because of the advent of air travel. I started finding expeditions that seemed to go out seasonally over a period of years. Some of these are defined as one long expedition with breaks, others as individual expeditions that are part of a series over several years.

 

South Africa, Nkonkoni: George Hughes [AMP participant] collecting trapped mammals and radioing back to camp from Lebombo Mountains, 6 miles north of Mkuze, April 1964. Photographed by A. C. Risser, Smithsonian African Mammal Project collection. Courtesy of Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History.

So imagine my surprise when I found what seemed to be a significant change in naming terminology for collecting trips, around the 1960s. We've come across several collecting trips from the 1960s that might have previously been called expeditions, but instead were called surveys, projects, and programs. Since cataloging materials from the mid to late twentieth century, I've seen little of the term “expedition.”  So what changed? I'm still trying to figure that out.

The change seems to correlate with speed of travel and a change in available staff. Many of these "projects" like Pacific Survey Biological Ocean Program (POBSP), African Mammal Project (AMP), and Smithsonian Venezuela Project (SVP), involved large numbers of personnel (often graduate students), over a tremendously wide expanse of territory. Perhaps the structure of these vast collecting events was better suited to new terminology.

 Since the 1960s, there seems to be a major shift in how the word “expedition” is used. When doing research for recent collections I've cataloged, I still find expeditions in the literature, but the majority of the organized collecting efforts we have cataloged since the 1960s do not use the term. When doing online research, I've noticed the word “expedition” has taken on a more commercial/recreational meaning. I often get results discussing vacation options with scientists as guides, run by any number of major museums. Whatever the reason for the shift, it appears that the term “expedition” has been adapted for trips that fall, to my eyes, more into the realm of ecotourism.

The Field Book Project has cataloged almost two hundred years of field work documentation. It has been fascinating to see how some aspects of collecting change and others remain consistent. Sometimes the reason for the change is self-evident. Others like my quandary with the apparent change in names, I am only left to ponder.

Happy Holidays from the Field Book Project!

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

In honor of this holiday season, we'd like to share some of the unusual content we've found in field  books: recipes from our specimen collectors.  Enjoy our virtual holiday card to you; we hope it provides some inspiration for your holiday celebrations. Recipes include: chocolate creams, orange lemon drops, molasses candy, neapolitan creams, tomas barrera cocktail, and rum and maracuyá (passion fruit). If you try one, please be sure to let us know what you think! Happy Holidays to all! 

 

Field Book Project Holiday Card 2012 

You can also download as a PDF from here.

Cataloging on the Edge

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

I write this in homage to all the Field Book Project interns who have, in the span of a week or months, turned out such great work.

Emily Hunter, Field Book Project Intern, Summer 2011 [and now Cataloger and Social Media Coordinator].	Jenny Mathias, Field Book Project Intern, Summer 2011.

I have worked in museums, historical societies, libraries, and archives in some manner most of my adult life. Before earning a Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS), I had been an intern, volunteer, or paid staff member performing a range of tasks from database design to conservation work. In these jobs I often felt like I was on the edge of the LIS profession, waiting to get into the thick of things. I thought when I got a job necessitating an MLIS, I would end up somewhere in the midst of what I saw in library school as the “norm”.

This has not been the case, which suits my background and interests. What I have come to realize is that the “norm” I envisioned just isn’t or won’t be for long. Much of what seems to be happening in archives, libraries, and museums is an ongoing conversation constantly defining a new norm. Projects like the Field Book Project (FBP) reside on this dynamic edge. This project is the result of ongoing dialog between archivists, librarians, and museum professionals who are striving to figure out new ways to express relationships between their holdings. In this case, we are working to express the relationship between the types of information in field notes in a way useful to a range of natural history disciplines. Additionally, as information management professionals, we do this within the ethics and principles of our professions.

What does this mean? Technology makes connecting and accessing materials increasingly easy. Archives, library, and museum professionals strive to make the new connections consistent, pertinent, accurate, as well as assure the materials will be available for the long haul—in the face of paper deterioration or technological obsolescence.

Richard Jerome, Field Book Project Intern, Summer 2012.	Alice Doolittle, Field Book Project Intern, Summer 2012.

Initial planning for the FBP was comprised of conversations between staff at Smithsonian Institution Archives and National Museum of Natural History, since field books are held by departments across the Smithsonian Institution. The resulting cataloging is a hybrid using Encoded Archival Context (EAC), a standard created for archives; Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD), created for natural history collections; and item level cataloging similar to what libraries use.

Since I’ve been a part of FBP, I’ve seen that the separation between types of institutions is no longer quite so deep. Information about resources is organized less by where the resource is located and increasingly by content and context. Just two years ago, I found few if any descriptions of field books online. Recently, libraries, archives, and museums have put catalog records for field books in Biodiversity Heritage Library; OCLC’s WorldCat; and are preparing to contribute to the Digital Public Library of America. Each of the online field book records offers varying types of description. The conversation about how to best represent a field book is ongoing. We currently have over 6600 field book records in our Field Book Registry (now available on Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center), and we plan to eventually include catalog records from other institutions nationally.

Seeing this play out, I begin to see that lessons I learned in graduate school were the result of previous conversations dealing with challenges of an earlier time. As a student I learned how LIS professionals dealt with challenges in the past and about what they were doing now. Once I started working with the materials, staff, and users, I saw how these examples from school taught me the places to look and the principles to use when I became part of the conversation.

So what does all this mean for the interns? Two points come to mind. First, this “edge” is where internships seem to blossom. Many of the most interesting internships are with projects and programs that are small, innovative, and that deal with how to make information accessible beyond its original confines. The Smithsonian has a lot of these. Secondly, this “edge” will probably be the norm for a while, so be sure to listen to the conversations. For a long time, information resources (e.g. books or primary documents) were mostly defined by where they resided. Now, libraries, archives, and museums are progressing to where content is also a driving force in how their collections are described and accessed.

So interns, listen, watch, ask, and share. Whether it’s a week or a semester, the internship is your chance to hear the conversation first hand. And, thanks for all the great work!

 

Catalog Records for Smithsonian Field Books Now Online

By Carolyn Sheffield

The Field Book Project is pleased to announce that catalog records describing thousands of Smithsonian field books—including those we’ve blogged about here—are now available online through the Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center: http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=unit_code%3AFBR&tag.cstype=all.

The launch of these records represents the first time they have been publicly available. Altogether, these records describe 6,679 field books comprising 542 collections housed at the Smithsonian Institution. A subset of these records includes digital images of field books for viewing alongside the records.  In addition to the detailed catalog records, there are also 927 authority files providing biographical and historical details for the persons, organizations, and expeditions involved in the creation of these field books. A few months back, supervisory archivist Tammy Peters blogged about the significance of these records and the veritable social network they form between collaborators, co-participants on expeditions, and institutional affiliations.

Frederick V. Coville. SIA Acc. 90-105. SIA2008-0296.

Take for instance Frederick Vernon Coville, a botanist and blueberry breeder, who was the subject of one of our very first blog posts. Looking at Coville’s authority file will tell you more about his life and career.  Use the file as a springboard to find information on collections related to him, as well as detailed descriptions about field books within those collections.  From those field book records, access links for expeditions Coville participated in, such as the Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899).  These links allow you to view field books related to Coville’s expeditions or view records about those expeditions.  From the expedition records, links are provided to learn more about other participants of that expedition and the field books they created.

Authority file for Frederick Vernon Coville.  Select the image of the record to view a larger version.

 

Authority file for the Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899). Select the image of the record to view a larger version.

We hope you’ll take a look around, search for some of the scientists you’re familiar with, navigate through their collections and field books, and explore materials created by some of their collaborators. 

Not sure where to start? Browse any of our blog posts by discipline to find a person or topic of interest. Be sure to try out the tagging option in Collections Search, too. And by all means, let us know what you think!

 

Counting Camels : A Look at the Journals of a Big-Game Hunter

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Verso of page 101 from N. C. Cockburn’s journal volume 1 (1900-1906) covering his time in India. The volume is part of the Russell E. Train Africana Collection at the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

We’ve all been part of painful road trips, whether because of travel companions, inclement weather, or just bad luck. As hassles or problems mount, a count usually occurs. It may be the number of times a travel companion says the same thing or times the car breaks down. While working on the field journals of N. C. Cockburn, I found a new way to measure a bad trip – dead camels, 52 to be exact.

N. C. Cockburn is one of the more unusual collectors whose field books have been documented in the Field Book Registry. He was a big game hunter. His eight journals are part of the Russell E. Train Africana Collection, at the Smithsonian Institution's Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History in the National Museum of Natural History. We have included 22 field books from the collection, including a field book by Sir John Kirk which we discussed in a blog post in May 2012.

Cockburn’s journals are a fascinating read. His journals cover his collecting in Rhodesia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and India during 1900-1914, a time when westerners often thought of Africa in terms of colonial empires, big-game hunters, and safaris. He also recorded diverse kinds of information that give a captivating picture of the time – all alongside specimen entries.

Cockburn had a very neat and consistent style of recording. Examples are seen below. He would record daily entries on the right hand pages and any additional information on the verso of the previous page. An amazing range can be found on the verso, including postcards, images lists and details about birds of specific regions, sketches of collecting sites, specimen details, and (of course) counts of dead camels (not pictured).

N. C. Cockburn’s second volume, verso of page 43. Includes list and details about birds of Kashmir.	Page 44 (second volume) with entries covering Cockburn’s time in camp.
Verso of page 22 from Volume 2.	Verso of page 5 from Volume 2.

The pages above show the wide range of information found in the eight volumes; Cockburn’s journal entries and notes cover economic and geographical data, specimens collected, wildlife observations (including fish and birds), weather, barometric readings, campsites, method of hunting, travel, personal impressions, travel challenges, interactions with staff and fellow travelers and local inhabitants, and use of local languages. Sometimes there are lists of notes on survival rate of beasts of burden, supplies, distances, and other aspects of the trips. All this followed by subject indexes.

The 52 camels were recorded during a particularly arduous collecting trip in Cockburn’s journal for 1909 while he was in Abyssinia. Cockburn would update the total of dead camels on the left hand page of the journal every few days. Like someone watching a horror movie, I lingered, unsure if I wanted to turn the page and find another tally.

Many of the materials that are part of the Train collection were the product of individuals or colonial empires surveying and collecting in regions of Africa they controlled. They were created by big game hunters, military, or government officials. The specimens in many cases were collected for personal interest and not originally destined for educational institutions, though many ended up in museums. These collectors’ motivations often differ from those of collectors who were affiliated with the Smithsonian and whose collecting was primarily for scientific study. In terms of the specimens, though, these field books serve the same purpose: they document the collecting event. For me, it offers another example of the range of content and context one can expect to find in a “field book.”

The Diaries of Floyd Alonzo McClure

By Emily Hunter, Field Book Project

Floyd Alonzo McClure conducting field work, possibly in China, circa 1919-1950. SIA Acc. T90028. Box 7 Folder 15. No negative number.

We get to know some interesting characters by reading field notes. Floyd Alonzo McClure (1897-1970) was one of these characters that I had the pleasure of learning about while cataloging SIA collection T90028.

McClure was a bamboo guy. (We really get familiar with these collectors, don’t we?) To put it another way, he studied Bambusoideae, a large group of genera in the grass family (Poaceae), for the majority of his career. His major work was the publication “The Bamboos, a Fresh Perspective,” which was published in 1966. McClure’s connection to the Smithsonian began in 1940s, when he joined the National Museum of Natural History as an Honorary Research Associate. But let’s start a little earlier.

China

McClure was born in 1897 in Shelby County, Ohio. He attended Ohio State University where he earned a BS in Agriculture in 1919. That year, McClure took a position in China teaching Economic Botany at Canton Christian College (later Lingnan University), a move that would define much of his life and career and lead him to spend 24 years in that country.

McClure found a lot to learn about in China beyond just bamboo. He studied Chinese language and culture. He was interested in the land, the people, and the local customs. As a botanist, these interests served him well. Navigating the country, speaking with farmers, and learning local uses for bamboo plants certainly must have informed his career in economic botany.

McClure’s diary from Hainan, China, 1921.  SIA Acc. T90028. Box 8 Folder 24. No negative number.

McClure lived in Canton, China and went on collecting expeditions throughout Hainan province in 1921, 1922, 1929, and 1932. He collected bamboo specimens mainly, but occasionally other grasses, orchids, and other higher plants. He wrote about his daily experiences and observations in his diaries. While reading through, I found his reflections on the people and cultures he observed respectful and thoughtful. He made “tentative” observations, and allowed for differences in perspective and opinion. McClure was a humble man. His field notes made it very clear that even though he was a teacher, he enjoyed learning from others around him. The Japanese invasion of China in 1941 forced McClure to return to the United States where he would spend the rest of his life.

Family

It’s easy to get lost in McClure’s diaries. They speak of his day-to-day life, a blend of family and botanizing. Amidst teaching and conducting botanical work in the lab, McClure went on bicycle rides with his wife Ruth, and spent a great deal of time with his two young daughters, Sophie Louise and Janet (or “Bunny”).

His entries depict a loving and dedicated husband and father. McClure’s family did, indeed, seem to become enmeshed in his professional life. The first and strongest example is the fact that McClure brought his new wife to Canton where they spent the first decades of married life together and raised two children. When McClure took trips, his wife and children sometimes came along. In 1959, Ruth became his research assistant, working with him daily until he passed away.

McClure with his wife Ruth and daughters, circa 1937. SIA Acc. T90028. Box 7 Folder 15. No negative number.

Economic Botany

McClure saw the connections between studying plants and thinking about how they can contribute to a society, reinforce culture, and even take a role during war times.

In 1943 McClure was recruited for his knowledge of bamboo by the U.S. military. If that sentence sounds odd to you, you are not alone—I also was surprised to learn this! During World War II, the National Defense Research Committee was looking for someone with a deep knowledge of bamboo to research options for making ski poles for troops in extreme northern climates. At the time, wood was expensive and increasingly in demand. Bamboo was practical and fairly cheap. McClure was their man. McClure traveled to Central American locations to research and conduct experiments on bamboo species that could be used to make ski poles. I haven’t found a great deal of information on the result of these efforts, but I certainly hope that U.S. troops benefited from McClure’s knowledge of safe, sturdy bamboo species.

Often, interesting tidbits like this one are wrapped up in the field notes. It’s what makes field notes so unique; they are rarely cut and dry, and more often than not, include all sorts of information beyond just lists of specimens collected. McClure’s diaries can give us a wealth of information on culture, wartime activities, family life, and the man behind the books.

 

References:

Meyer, F. G. (1972). Floyd Alonzo McClure (1897–1970) — A Tribute. Economic Botany, 26(1), 1-12.

Walker, E. H. & Archer, W. A. (1971). Floyd Alonzo McClure (1897-1970). Taxon, 20(5/6), 777-784.

A Conversation with David Pawson

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Dr. David Pawson in submersible in Curacao, August 2012. Image courtesy of David Pawson.

As part of the Beyond the Field Book Project section of our blog, we continue our series of interviews to learn more about who uses field books and for what kinds of research. I had the opportunity to interview David Pawson, PhD, with the Department of Invertebrate Zoology. He is a marine biologist, primarily studying sea urchins, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, and sea lilies. Dr. Pawson came to the Smithsonian in 1964. Over the course of his career, he has completed field work in a great variety of marine habitats, which has included more than 100 dives in research submarines, down to depths of more than two miles. Dr. Pawson was kind enough to share with us about his methods of field note documentation and how he has used field books in his research.

What types of information do you find important to record in field notes?

My “field notes” consist of several things—notebook entries describing what is seen during dives, still color images, cassette tape recordings, and videotapes. The cameras record most of the “vital” information; color, size, number of animals seen, and the commentary accompanying video recordings can provide information on behavior and other aspects.

What role do field notes play in the research process?

An absolutely vital role—we couldn’t function without them, of course. And, of course, the “notes” are usually accompanied by specimens we have collected, so we have the best of all worlds—well-documented animals!

Do you ever consult field notes done for another expedition, for example an historic expedition? If so, how do you use the information in those notes for your research?

Again, more recent expeditions, where “field notes” in the form of still and video images were made, can provide an endless amount of information. In the late 1960s and 1970s, at the Lamont Geological Observatory in New York, I studied more than 1 million seafloor photographs that had been taken at great depths in many parts of the world’s oceans. These provided a wealth of extremely valuable information on the animals we study. Older expeditions, where field notes are available, can provide much information of value to accompany the specimens collected. My wife and I have a particular interest in expeditions made by the US Fish Commission Steamer Albatross from 1883 to 1921, and we have consulted field notebooks compiled by various scientists who sailed on this ship—Paul Bartsch, Waldo Schmitt, Austin Clark, and others from the Smithsonian—and other notebooks held in various archives (Harvard University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography). These notebooks provide a lot of information, not only about life aboard a research steamship 100 years ago, but also on the animals caught, the sampling equipment used, and on the laboratory work that was performed. We are writing two books on the work of the Albatross.

If historic field books were available online, how would you want to be able to search them?

It would be most desirable if a keyword search could be made of these field books.

Is there anything else you would like to add…?

Just this: Any field notes are of great actual or potential value to science, not only because of their historic interest, but also because they can provide great scientific information! A friend of mine is studying Monterey Bay in California—learning as much as he can about the marine life in the Bay 50 to 100 years ago. He is trying to document changes that have occurred, and seeking the reasons for changes. Even casual field notes, taken decades ago, are proving to be sources of a great amount of valuable information.

Thank you, Dr. Pawson, for sharing with us about your work process and the use and value of field notes relating to your research. You can learn more about invertebrate zoology field notes on our blog.

Notes from the Field

By Scott Thybony

Scotty Thybony at Canyon Diablo, Arizona. Photograph by Robert Schneck.

Taking notes has become second nature for me.  After scratching down a few observations in the field, I return and work them into narrative notes.  They can end up being anything from a straight-forward record of events to stray impressions tied together into a storyline. 

A few of the notebooks used by the author in the field.  Photograph by Scott Thybony.

On recent trips to the Grand Canyon, these fieldnotes have included an investigation of paint smears on a cliff wall where the artist Louis Akin cleaned his palette more than 100-years ago.  They’ve described the dramatic unfolding of the last monsoon storm of the summer and traced the story of an old inscription carved on a rock face by the orphaned son of an Arctic explorer who died of starvation on a disastrous expedition.

So field notations in all their variety interest me – the journals of explorers, the notebooks of artists, and the diaries of scientists.  At times I’ve found myself deep in the back rooms of the Smithsonian Institution among file cabinets and specimen drawers, deciphering the faded pen and ink records they contain.  The field notebooks have a rawness to them I like, a spontaneity not found in monographs and memoirs.  One day I sat in the research library reading the diary of Charles Walcott, a geologist who spent three cold months in 1882 and 1883 studying rock formations below the rim of Grand Canyon.  I was searching for descriptions of the landscape between Nankoweap and Vishnu Temple written when he was seeing it for the first time, unfiltered.

Charles D. Walcott at Grand Canyon Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, SIA Local Number: 83-14116 or 75-2248

What I didn’t expect when I opened his diary was to encounter the human side of the geologist.  Walcott, who would go on to become director of the U.S. Geological Survey and head of the Smithsonian, was 32-years old and had lost his wife six years before.  As he rode the train west, he recorded in his diary a few routine observations and the normal chance encounters with other passengers.  And then the tone of his writing changed.  The scientist made a hurried entry beginning with the words, “Met a nonsensical girl . . .”.  It ended with a bold flourish of the pen, the only flourish in the entire diary.  And tucked between the pages I found a lock of fine blonde hair.  Sensible geologist encounters nonsensical girl, and balance is restored to the world. 

Once in the field, Walcott wrote about the geology, naturally, and the winter storms sweeping in, bringing snow and sleet.  He mentioned the packers, who hauled in supplies and carried out specimens, and trails so difficult they lost a mule off the edge of one.  He noted his frostbitten feet and water pockets freezing solid at night, forcing the men to place chunks of ice around the campfire to melt for the animals.  Camped at the river he wrote about the crashing rapids sounding like Niagara Falls.

I took notes on his notes from the Grand Canyon, but that’s not what stayed with me when I left the archives.  Walking down the street, I kept thinking about the wild flourish of the pen – and left between the pages of the diary, a single lock of hair, long forgotten. 

 

 

A former river guide and archeologist, Scott Thybony writes books and articles for major publications.  His interviews have ranged from astronauts to medicine men, while his travels through North America have resulted in award-winning magazines articles.

 

1. Charles D. Walcott at Grand Canyon

Local Number:  83-14116 or 75-2248

http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_9862?back=%2Fcollections%2Fsearch%3Fquery%3D%2522Paleontology%2522%26facets%3DEXP_15%26page%3D1%26perpage%3D10%26sort%3Drelevancy%26view%3Dlist

A Conversation with David Bloom on the Henderson Field Notes Project

By Carolyn Sheffield, Field Book Project

As part of our Beyond the Field Book Project section of this blog, we have been conducting a series of interviews to learn more about the value of field books for research and some of the challenges in trying to access them. This week, I’m very pleased to share a recent interview with David Bloom (and his co-conspirators) on a very exciting, multi-institutional project that successfully addresses some of those common challenges. David Bloom is the VertNet Coordinator and one-fifth of the Henderson Field Notes Project. Read on for an inspiring (and fun!) look at what this group was able to achieve in the space of one year.

Here at the Field Book Project, we’ve been reading the So You Think You Can Digitize blog, and it has been exciting to follow the work done on the Henderson Field Notes Project. For those readers who may be hearing of it for the first time, how would you describe the Henderson Field Notes Project?

Junius Henderson in 1904 at Arapaho Glacier. Image in the public domain. Retrieved December 2012 from Wikimedia Commons.

The Henderson Field Notes Project is an exploration of what is possible once a large volume of natural history-oriented material is digitized. In our case, this happens to be a set of fourteen volumes of field notes written between 1905 and 1919 by Junius Henderson, founder and first curator of the University of Colorado’s Museum of Natural History (CU Museum). Prior to the project we were exploring various questions about how, what, and why to digitize, but we realized that to answer these questions we needed some understanding of what we might want to do with a treasure trove of digitized data once we had it.

We had 5 initial goals:

1. To make Henderson’s notes accessible to the public, easily discoverable, and, preferably, bundled with appropriate descriptive, structural, and preservation metadata;

2. To accomplish Goal #1 using the least restrictive licensing available;

3. To use some of the automated data extraction tools we’ve discovered to do things such as linking names of taxa, places, people, and dates to other sources of biodiversity knowledge;

4. To produce at least one “Nifty Thing” as a result of this project — like a map on Google Earth showing Henderson’s travels or a fancy coffee mug adorned by a great picture of Henderson in the field;

5. To spend no more than five hours per person on this experiment — because we like the idea of discovering what substantial products can be produced on a budget of no money and close-to-no time.

We can celebrate, a year later, that we accomplished and documented (on our blog and in a special issue of ZooKeys) four of our five goals. We’ll let your readers decide which of our goals we failed to realize.

Three field books by Junius Henderson. Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, (c) 2012.

What is your background and how did you become involved? What is your role on the project?

As is the case with any epic adventure, the journey starts modestly only to balloon into a vast army of protagonists sharing a common goal. The Henderson Field Note Project team includes an army of five.

Rob Guralnick and Andrea Thomer are principally to blame for the Henderson Project. They identified Henderson’s field books as an opportunity to move the conversation about digitization forward. In doing so, they added Gaurav Vaidya to their corps for his Wikipedia-oriented expertise and to seek solutions that could bring both sets of Henderson data into a useful format.

Because an epic adventure would be incomplete without some co-opted innocent bystanders, Rob, Andrea, and Gaurav captured David Bloom and Laura Russell; David for his interest in citizen science and uncanny ability to herd cats, and Laura for her unparalleled expertise with Darwin Core and abilities to solve the problems that other programmers stumble upon when seeking Wikipedia-oriented solutions.

What were some of the challenges you encountered?

Field book of Junius Henderson, from Bouder, CO, July 1905. Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, (c) 2012.

1. Crowdsourcing: How were we going to communicate with and excite a group of people who we couldn’t be certain even existed to visit our wiki pages and help us by becoming virtual participants and edit transcriptions, tag elements in the text, and generally keep our project from taking years and years to complete? One big solution was our blog. Fortunately, our army of five includes no wallflowers, so we already had a following as a result of other projects, including multiple social media accounts. We put out calls for volunteers and posted some fairly detailed instructions for participation on the blog. The result was fantastic. We had lots of people jump in to help — most of whom chose to remain anonymous on Wikisource (and no, not knowing the identities of the majority of our volunteers was never considered to be a liability or a challenge).

2. Wikisource vs. other platforms: We had a lot of options before us and we could have used any number of them to meet our goals. We knew that any tool or tools we selected needed to allow us to make Henderson’s notes easily discoverable, publicly accessible, freely reusable, and preserved sustainably so we could extract taxonomic occurrences from them. After plenty of research and tinkering, by Gaurav in particular, we settled on Wikisource as our primary tool. We believe that Wikisource provided the best combination of ease of use, open access, an existing community of developers and users, and a set of existing templates from which we could launch our efforts (read more in our Zookeys paper). We realized that Wikisource was not perfect, but it was about all that we could have hoped for given that we had no idea where we were headed at the start. Despite the imperfection, Wikisource continues to be a great foundation for discussion and discovery. We still have many new questions about Wikisource, as well as all other aspects of the project, which is, of course, just about the best set of results for which we could have asked.

Screen shot of Wikisource interface, showing the transcription and tags on left and scan of page on right. Image courtesy of the Henderson Field Notes Project.

3. Moving Taxonomic Records From Text to Spreadsheet: It is no trifle to take a written observation of a taxon from a field book, extract it and its associated metadata from the page, insert it into a spreadsheet that is organized to meet a global standard of biodiversity data exchange, such as Darwin Core, in an efficient and accurate manner. After several long conference calls and some trial and many errors we did find a way to make this happen (see “Data extraction: Seeking efficiency and accuracy”). It may not be the best way to do it, and we’re still toying with other options, but it was effective enough for us to extract taxonomic records, dates, and localities from the first three volumes of Henderson’s field books and publish them as a Darwin Core Archive.

Screen shot of Wikisource interface with an example of data people were asked to tag: taxon, location, and date. Image courtesy of the Henderson Field Notes Project.

3.5. Related to the creation of a Darwin Core Archive with taxonomic records was a self-imposed challenge to link each observation back to the page(s) of the field notes from which it was pulled. The primary reason for this was to provide researchers and enthusiasts alike with the opportunity to read about each observation in context. This effort was influential in the evolution of our understanding of an endeavor such as this; in particular, it was the source of many new questions about why viewing data in context could be important to a line of research — absence versus presence, being one such instance.

4. Name Resolution and Proofing the Darwin Core Data Set: There isn’t a biologist alive today who can’t point to an issue of classification and naming that edges the study of their beloved taxon of choice toward chaos. During the course of our project we were confronted by many issues of idiosyncratic naming protocols, confused synonymies, conflicting naming services, and, in some cases, a lack of proper names altogether. To solve our problems, at least for the project, Laura did a lot of heavy lifting to compare the accuracy of several services, such as ITIS and EOL, and Gaurav followed up by checking each taxonomic reference in our data set that had conflicting options from these services and selected the best match. Finally, Rob reviewed several of the volumes manually for errors in formatting, labeling, and annotations created by our volunteer corps. All the while Andrea and Dave sat around drinking mint juleps and discussing the merits of georeferencing all of the records in the data set (sadly, we haven’t managed to complete that part of our project...yet). Again, we wrote about this in detail in our paper.

Henderson field notes. Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, (c) 2012.

How do you envision the results of the project being used?

We do have aspirations to continue the project and to see the annotation of all fourteen books completed and the taxonomic records extracted into a single Darwin Core Archive, complete with georeferences and other data quality improvements. If we learned one thing from this project, it is that it takes just as much energy to rally the volunteers and keep them working as it does for us to find the time in our own schedules to keep a steady stream of transcriptions and scans available with which they can keep themselves amused.

Are there other projects you’d like to see happen, or like to be involved in, that involve improving access to the content of field books?

It is our nature to want to be involved with everything that everyone is doing all the time with every set of field notes at every institution ever. If we could, we’d love to be the founding staff at the National Archives of Biodiversity Writing, Illustration, Events, Ramblings, and Discovery (NABWIERD) and to have the opportunity to work with field books from far and wide every day. We’d have the best marketing campaign. EVER!

In the meantime, we’re very happy to continue to find ways to use the Henderson Project to expand our personal knowledge as well as that of the larger (often interdisciplinary) community interested in digitization, archives, and museum collections. We are always interested in a challenge, and we remain willing to help anyone who asks. That is, after all, the role of an epic army of digital adventurers, such as ours. All anyone needs to do is ask.

Anything else you would like to add?

Yeah, folks can “ask” us at:
andrea.thomer@gmail.com (http://twitter.com/an_dre_a_)
dbloom@vertnet.org (http://twitter.com/dabblepop)
gaurav@ggvaidya.com (http://twitter.com/mrvaidya)
robert.guralnick@colorado.edu (http://twitter.com/robgural)
larussell@vertnet.org (http://twitter.com/pagodarose)

Reference Challenges and Opportunities with the Field Book Project

By Ellen Alers, Reference Archivist, Smithsonian Institution Archives

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA), along with the Natural Museum of Natural History, hosts staff from the Field Book Project (FBP) and sometimes helps provide reference for unique field book collections. Field books, however, are not the reference team's only responsibility, and their uniqueness poses special challenges for us. 

The SIA is the institutional archives for the whole of the Smithsonian. It collects, preserves and makes accessible records that document the establishment and ongoing work of the institution—19 museums and galleries, nine research centers, the National Zoo, and administrative offices—you get the picture. It's the largest archives collection within the Smithsonian and, I venture to say, one of the best exposed on the web. SIA made a conscious decision to make its holding’s as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience. Virtually all unrestricted finding aids (4265) are searchable and available online. This, as you may guess, is a blessing and a curse.

Record Unit 7306, box 2, folder 1. Measurements with diagram of the Fenykovi Elephant, provided by Jose Fenykovi, circa 1955, SIA2010-0605.

The volume of requests is high (5000 remote requests last year), international in scope, and the audience diverse—kids, scholars, research scientists, genealogists, etc. So, it is not uncommon for a member of the reference staff—thankfully there are three of us—to hop from researching objects in an exhibition to locating an architectural structures report from the 1970s to investigating the donation of a leather pocketbook in the 1920s to acquiring the skeletal measurements for the elephant in the rotunda of the Museum of Natural History. This makes the team consummate generalists rather than experts in the subtle minutia—think Swiss Army rather than sushi knife.

Because SIA finding aids are well done, a good number of the questions are focused and direct with a fairly clear path to the answer. Field books, however, pose different challenges and make the FBP shine as a reference archivist's dream.

Like any reference request, understanding what a patron hopes/expects us to provide is one thing, and what we actually find is another. Sometimes this shortfall can be disappointing for the researcher. On the one hand, this stems from a researcher's unfulfilled expectation of what they think “should” be there. On the other hand, sometimes the reference staff doesn't have the time to read the notes deeply, copy hundreds of pages from delicate notebooks, or possess the expertise to spot the telltale that solves the mystery.

Page 19 of Paul Bartsch’s journal from the Tomas Barrera Cuban Expedition, 1914. Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2012-1778. Read more about this recipe here.

The FBP staff's careful cataloging, digital scanning of the notebooks and blogging make these hard-to-find treasures available to researchers anywhere in the world. They have identified materials in other parts of the institution, expanding the scope of known resources. They have established connections between collectors, identifying possible resources for filling gaps in one field book by looking at a fellow collector's field book from the same expedition. (For more on this topic check out Tammy Peters’s blog post on historical context and connections.)

The focus of the FBP staff allows them more time than the reference team to delve into the details and personalities behind the notebooks and uncover interesting tidbits—cocktail recipes, poetry and sketches (both visual and textual), brow raising stories of collectors—that really bring these records to life. Bottom line, they could dish some dirt in the 1920s.  

In all, the FBP promises a virtual archive that researchers can access from their desks anywhere in the world and that makes this reference archivist very happy. 

How to Run an Expedition

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Cover of Edmund Heller’s notebook for National Geographic Society Yale University Peruvian Expedition, 1915. Image courtesy of Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History.

Many of the collections I’ve cataloged have had extensive correspondence and other types of materials documenting the planning of expeditions. I have sometimes found a year’s worth of materials covering negotiations between institutions, companies, and nations. These types of materials do not fall into the scope of what we catalog, but they can be helpful to us for understanding information we find in field books from a collecting trip. They often include details about where collecting occurred, what circumstances affected collecting, and where documenting materials reside.

"Narciso and Tomas," Peruvian guides and helpers packing the mules to go. The photo was taken by Edmund Heller while on the Peruvian Expedition of 1914-15, which was sponsored by Yale University and The National Geographic Society. Smithsonian Institution Archives. 94-12224.

We often know a lot about the planning before a collecting event, but frequently the more mundane details like meal planning, day-to-day accommodations, and such are not documented except in archival materials created during an expedition. These types of logistics are usually discussed in collector journals or correspondence about shipping specimens to home institutions.

So I was very surprised to find a bound and embossed notebook from the National Geographic Society Yale University Peruvian Expedition, 1915, with information and directions for participants during the trip. The notebook contains official circulars for the expedition, covering almost all aspects of the expedition preparation and execution. Some are instructions for personnel (including local dentistry options), care and purchase of equipment (including mules), weekly menus with recipes, procedures, expedition updates, contact information, and examples of types of pottery discovered. Circulars are numbered and sometimes dated. Some are even in Spanish for the local staff.

Page providing instructions to expedition members for keeping their journals.	Page discussing daily menus from expedition.

Unfortunately this notebook contains no original documentation about specimens collected, so it is not cataloged, but it a fascinating example of supplementary materials that sometimes exist alongside the field books. It struck me as akin to a modern travel guide. Like many of the materials we find, I don’t know the entire history of the item such as whether members had to update their own copies with new memos or if there was even more than one copy. But, it is a fascinating example of how to handle the day-to-day logistics of an expedition. I find this notebook especially fascinating because it seems so unusual compared to the documentation I’ve found for expeditions of the same time period. The kind of consistency of participant documentation it promotes and the wide range of local information it contains seems to correlate with major collecting efforts I’ve cataloged from the 1960s.

Portion of the notebook providing advice about dentistry.

I have not found the documents instructing participants for the collecting trips of the 1960s, I’ve only seen the results. The similarity in field book and catalog content from projects like Smithsonian African Mammal Project and Smithsonian Venezuela Project indicate that the projects had explicit instructions about the type of information to be collected and how it should be recorded.

It seems that if documents covering day-to-day logistics exist for collecting events, they are not frequently retained; yet these types of materials provide much needed information about what participants look for and what they are to document. They provide details about daily life in the field that in inspire imagination, and I love the glimpse back in time that this expedition guide represents. Besides, if it were not for these documents, I might never have learned about erbswurst (that’s a hint to read the daily menu!).

In Search of Missing Field Books

By Edward Davis, University of Oregon

Original J. Arnold Shotwell Mammalogy field book, 1947. Photo by Lieke Dircks, 2012.

Field books are the lifeblood of a natural history collection. It's hard to conceive of a museum without its field notes, but that's exactly what I found when I arrived at the Condon Fossil Collection of the University of Oregon (UO) Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH) in 2007: close to 100 years of collections without original field notes. Digging into the problem revealed that the notebooks weren't gone (a relief) but had just followed collectors when they left the museum.

Our fossil collection traces its history back to the pioneer geologist Thomas Condon, who began collecting in the area that is now John Day National Monument in the 1860s. Condon amassed almost 6000 specimens, with the majority of his collections from the John Day and Fossil Lake fossil mammal faunas. Upon Condon’s death in 1907, UO acquired his collection, forming the basis of the current MNCH, and in 1918 hired Earl Packard to succeed him.

Original Shotwell Paleontology field book, 1952. Photo by Lieke Dircks, 2012.

Packard had Condon's notebooks transcribed into a new printed catalog, which has been passed down to me through a series of mimeographs and photocopies of mimeographs. While I haven't yet seen Condon's original notebooks, I do have a good record of the provenance of Condon's fossils. I am still hopeful of finding Condon's original notebooks, and as time allows, I plan to visit the UO archives and other appropriate archives in the state.

Earl Packard’s field notes are a more difficult problem, but we seem to have found a solution. Packard oversaw the Condon Collection through the 1930s, when all natural science research at Oregon public universities (including the Condon Collection) was moved to Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis. Shortly after Packard retired in 1950, the Condon Collection returned to UO, but Packard's notes have remained in Corvallis, where they are a part of the OSU archives. Elizabeth Orr, our still very active emeritus collections manager, has been instrumental in hunting down Packard’s missing records. While we don't yet have a complete set of Packard's notes, it is reassuring to know they exist and are protected at the OSU archives.

Transcribed Paleontology field notes from Shotwell, 1955. Photoby Lieke Dircks, 2012.

After Packard retired, the Condon Collection was incorporated into the UO Museum of Natural History under paleontologist J. Arnold Shotwell. Shotwell was a tremendous collector, amassing tens of thousands of specimens over his more than 20 years at UO. Unfortunately, a 1972 disagreement with the UO administration over budget tightening measures lead to Shotwell’s angry departure from the UO; he carried all his field notes with him. In the 2000s, Ted Fremd, then Head Paleontologist at the John Day National Monument, approached Shotwell, and the two developed a friendship. Over the following few years, Shotwell shared many of his notes with Fremd, who in turn has shared copies with us, allowing us to finally fully document Shotwell’s critical paleoecological collections. Unfortunately, Arnold Shotwell died in early 2012, but before he died the paleontologists at UO managed to reconcile with him, even recognizing him with a MNCH lifetime achievement award. His family has graciously agreed to pass on to MNCH the remainder of the notes, photographs, and maps documenting his field collections.

The UO paleontologists after Shotwell are still with the university, either as emeritus or active faculty, and have been contributing their field books to the MNCH archives. For all new collections, we archive digital copies of field books annually and add their printouts to the museum’s physical archives. I hope my story gives you a sense of the frustration I have felt tracking down these notes, knowing that the effort of decades of fieldwork is lost without them. A sense of scientific duty drives my new dedication to the immediate deposit of field notes. As ethical collectors, we must ensure that future workers won’t have to search for our field books; without supporting documentation, the specimens we collect today may as well be paperweights.

A Recipe for Specimen Collecting

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Portion of A. C. Risser’s field journal (page 89) discussing ingredients for bait. Note in margin defines “ghee.” Housed in Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History. Image number risser_a_c_196504-196508-89b.

Last Thanksgiving, I discussed the range of food references we have found in collectors’ field notes. I think food makes a great topic given the traditions of the holiday. This year a new aspect of food presented itself as a topic: bait.

The field notes we catalog frequently include details about collecting methods. If the collector is using traps, they might record the types, quantity, and location of traps in a given collecting area. Sometimes collectors even include hand drawn maps of trap placement or detailed sketches about their construction. Collectors also sometimes discuss the type of bait they use.

My curiosity with this topic was born the day I read the following entry by Caleb Kennerly in Puget Sound with the Northwest Boundary Survey, 1857-1861:

13. Starfish and mouse. Steilacoom, WJ. July 4. The former taken with hook in ten fathoms of water, and it had swallowed the small piece of fresh mutton with which the hook was baited.

I have no idea how he came to use mutton as bait, but I made sure to keep my eye out for more information about bait in field books. I found a few references here and there; the information was often sparse, and what little I did find left me intrigued and confused. A few collectors made notes. Alexander Wetmore listed a recipe for bee bait in his field book for August 1902 - April 1903 when he lived in North Freedom, Wisconsin. Frederick True and Daniel Prentiss, Jr., wrote that they used bait composed of anise, oatmeal, and bacon during summer of 1897 in Hancock County, Maine. So now I had references to using mutton and anise, two ingredients I’ve never associated with bait.

I didn’t find any consistent listings or descriptions of bait until I began cataloging in the Division of Mammals. I found a lot of information in field books on bait choices, especially for two projects during the 1960’s: Smithsonian Venezuela Project (SVP) and Smithsonian African Mammal Project (AMP). After working on these two collections I came up with two theories to explain the mutton and anise.

My first theory is that collectors often use whatever is readily available. I found several references in AMP field books to purchasing bait ingredients at local markets. This might explain Kennerly’s use of mutton to catch a starfish. The second theory developed because, unlike the entries in nineteenth century field books, entries from the 1960’s I have read tend be more expansive about what bait ingredients are used and why.

Choices usually seem to involve some sort of grain, fruit, and/or protein. During AMP, collectors of mammals used combinations like: sundried fish; rice-oatmeal mixture, flavored with sardine sauce; banana; or rice and banana mixture. Frederick True and Daniel Prentiss, Jr., were using the same kind of combination; however their listing of anise probably related to anise oil. A SVP participant listed using fresh ripe banana on some old peanut butter, oats, and anise oil as bait.

Now that I’ve laid the background, below are some bait recipes I’ve found. A lot of these remind me of breakfast. As of yet I have not found one involving desserts, but I’m holding out hope.

• September 4, 1962 – Madagascar: traps baited with sun-dried fish
• November 7, 1962 – Madagascar: traps baited with a rice-oatmeal mixture, flavored with sardine sauce.
• January 31, 1963 – Mauritius: traps baited with banana
• April 4, 1963 – Madagascar: traps baited with rice and banana mixture
• July 3, 1965 – West Pakistan: trap baited with white oats, 2 eggs, ghee, parmesan cheese and water. [The collector stated in his journal that he used this combination because he couldn’t find any bananas.]

Whatever food graces your table this year, all of us at the Field Book Project wish you a Happy Thanksgiving!

Cultivating the Next Generation of Field Books

By Nicole Webster, Forensic Anthropology Lab Educator

Selection from the field book of Tho Tran, who interned with the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Mammal. 2012.

This summer, the National Museum of National History (NMNH) selected 25 local teen interns from underrepresented STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) populations to take part in the YES! (Youth Engagement Through Science) program. Throughout the summer portion of this program, each of the interns was paired with a scientist mentor at NMNH, Smithsonian National Zoological Park, or Smithsonian Gardens. The YES! intern projects ranged from tasks as varied as assisting the Department of Paleobiology with prep for isotope analysis to working as a zookeeper aide for Asia Trail. One of the common threads through all of the internships was that students documented their daily experiences and project research in field books. This day-to-day note taking would assist them by helping to develop their observation and scientific note taking skills and providing a vital record for the end of their summer when their work culminated in a poster showcase for Smithsonian staff at the NMNH Director’s Hall.

The YES! interns first delved into the world of field books by learning from the examples of Smithsonian scientists, both past and present. They worked together to identify key aspects of what should be included in daily notes by comparing sample field books from different departments in the museum and visiting the National Museum of Natural History Main Library to explore historic field books from the Department of Botany. Armed with this basic knowledge, and new personal field books, they first took to the public floor of NMNH to test their observation and note taking skills by using the museum as the "field".

Zeidy Cardoso’s notes from the “Using the Museum as the Field” activity. 2012.	Portion of a daily entry by Abram Shaw, who interned as a keeper aide at the Small Mammal house at the National Zoo. 2012

After the YES! interns had built and demonstrated a baseline of practical and historical knowledge about field books, their scientist mentors took the lesson to the next level by sharing their personal field books and helping the interns to tailor their note taking to the students’ individual projects. Throughout the summer, their progress was tracked by weekly field book check-ins, making sure the students were recording data and experiences to the best of their abilities.

Selection from the field notes of William Guzman Jr., who interned at the NMNH Insect Zoo/Butterfly Pavilion.

At the end of the summer portion of the program, the interns turned in their field books for review and shared their thoughts on the process. I was thrilled by both the openness and honesty in their writing, and the effort many of the students had made to record their experiences in their entirety. Those who committed themselves to the experience gained a newfound respect for the importance of field books in science.

Notes and sketches from the field book of Jennifer Cruzl, who interned in the Department of Botany. 2012.

YES! interns were asked to anonymously provide feedback at the end of the program. The comments below from two participants illustrate just how important the students' field books became over the summer:

"It was a good use of my time during my internship, because I could reflect on my work and experience everyday. I was also able to write down any idea that came to me."

"I liked my field notebook because it has made me feel official and professional. It helped me keep things organized and updated. In addition, I recorded my ideas for future experiments and projects."

Every YES! intern adopted their own personal style for recording their experiences. From the botany intern that selected a specimen daily to describe in further detail because it had “caught their eye,” to the Insect Zoo intern that recorded not only the behavior of the invertebrates he was caring for, but also those of the museum visitors. Students approached the design of their field books differently, some structuring their field notes for systematic entries, others using more of a diary format. It was intriguing to see how students took their training and remodeled what they had learned to fit their individual project, providing a unique window into the work that encompassed all their summer experiences.

Learn more about YES!

Enjoy the Journey

By Tad Bennicoff, Reference Archivist, Smithsonian Institution Archives

James A. Peters field notes, Mexico, 1949: Notes on Eleutherodactylus occidentalis specimen. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7175, Box 49, Folder 4, Image SIA2012-6364.

 One of the joys (and perhaps frustrations!) of conducting historical research is the mystery of what might be found upon reviewing original, archival materials.  Quite often, one enters into such research with anticipation, hope, and a level of expectation regarding the information being sought.  If the focus of consulting a particular historical resource lies solely in unearthing details to further one’s own theory, or confirm an expectation, it can become easy to overlook the fascinating materials encountered along the way, and the destination becomes more important than the journey.  Such was the case as I commenced with this article. 

My experience working with the Smithsonian’s collection of field books is rather limited, as I am not assigned to the Field Book Project, but rather am a Reference Archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives.  My chief responsibility is to reply to the inquiries we receive related to our holdings.  Thus, I do not have the luxury of becoming intimate with a particular collection and spend considerable time breezing past materials that may be of personal interest, but unrelated to a specific research request.  This very “businesslike” approach is similar to James A. Peters's style of note taking found in Record Unit 7175: James A. Peters Papers, and Records of the Division of Reptiles and Amphibians, 1927-1973 (Papers), 1927-1966 (Records).

James A. Peters field notes, Mexico, 1949: Tracing of Hyla smaragdina specimen. Note the source of the tracing is cited. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7175, Box 49, Folder 4, Image SIA2012-6426.

James Arthur Peters (1922-1972) was trained as a biologist.  He spent time as a member of the Brown University faculty (1952-1958) and served as Professor of Biology at San Fernando State College (1959-1964) prior to accepting the position Associate Curator in the Division of Reptiles and Amphibians at the United States National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History) in 1964.  He became “supervisor and curator” of the division in 1967, a title which he held until his untimely passing in 1972.  His field notes are very professional, his handwriting quite legible.  Each entry includes careful details, such as the date, location, and circumstances under which a specimen was observed.  It is obvious that Dr. Peters valued his field notes, as he added typed pages expressing conclusions formed after extensive observations in the field.  His field notes also include tracings of specimens from published works wth citations.   Upon reviewing just a few pages, it becomes clear that the field notes of James Arthur Peters would be a valuable resource for an aspiring or established Herpetologist. 

Conducting research on another’s behalf can be challenging, especially when you happen upon interesting or curious materials unrelated to the request.  This happens quite frequently, as it did upon preparing this post.  I was reviewing the field notes of George Sprague Myers (Record Unit 7317: George Sprague Myers Papers, circa 1903-1986 and undated,) a Herpetologist, Ichthyologist, and former Assistant Curator in Charge, Division of Fishes, United States National Museum.  Professor Myers left the United States National Museum in 1936 to accept a professorship at his alma mater, Stanford University.  Myers was a prolific writer and educator, with more than 600 published papers to his credit (a well-written memorial resolution for George Sprague Myers is available online.) 

High School notebook of George Sprague Myers. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7317, Box 57, Folder 1.	High School notebook of George Sprague Myers. Pages containing History notes, as well as drawings of fish. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7317, Box 57, Folder 1.

The Myers Papers are rich with correspondence, research notes, and scientific manuscripts.  Included among his papers is a notebook labeled “Period 4 English, Room 307, D.H.S.” (Box 57, Folder 1: High School Notebook).  It sparked my curiosity, so I had to have a look.  The notebook contains Myers notes on Homer’s Odyssey, long a standard study of a high school English class.  Flipping through the pages you will find notes on Greek gods and characters represented in the epic, as well as notes on fish!  Adjacent to a page full of notes on the Helvetians (Myers must have used this notebook for a History class one particular day) are drawings of fish!  There are similar notes and drawings present throughout the notebook.  Thus, even in high school, while others were daydreaming of summer vacation or perhaps their Friday evening hangout, Myers, who had found his calling as an Ichthyologist, was daydreaming of fish!

The field books held by the Smithsonian Institution may be viewed as a microcosm of the Institution itself; there is a little something for everyone, whether it be the seasoned scientist seeking very specific data, a student of history interested in reviewing primary sources, or a researcher hoping to develop a human profile of a field book author who seemingly gathered and processed data with machine-like precision.  One of the goals of the Field Book Project is to digitize many of the field books and make them available with only a few strokes of your keyboard.  If you are interested, and take the time to review the pages and enjoy the journey, I believe you will find the field books to be much like the totality of the Smithsonian Institution: Seriously Amazing!

More James A. Peters field notes on our blog

More herpetology field notes on our blog

Images on Flickr Commons, November 2012

Two notebook pages with rubbing from Foshag's San Agustín Acasaguastlan notebook. Acc 91-144, Box 1, Field Notebooks (Re: Jade); Two notebook pages with rubbing from Foshag's San Agustín Acasaguastlan notebook, rubbing from sample 4734 of a jade carving SIA 2011-0945. http://nmnh.typepad.com/fieldbooks/2011/06/foshag.html

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

In September of 2012, we launched a series of Flickr sets to highlight the wonderful visual content of our blog posts. These images document the wide variety of field books we catalog here at the Field Book Project, and were kindly digitized for us by the Smithsonian Institution Archives Digital Services. Being on Flickr gives us a chance to share content with a wider audience and users the chance to interact with images more directly (e.g. tagging and commenting) than is possible in the blog format.

This is the third installment in the series, available to through the Smithsonian’s Flickr Commons stream. The set includes 27 images that accompanied blog posts from 2011. These come from scrapbooks, journals, photographs, drawings, and logbooks, and document field work completed around the world, over the course of two centuries.

So take a look, comment, follow the url in the caption to the related blog post to learn more. We hope you enjoy the images as much as we do.

See Flickr Set

Why Are You Cataloging in Rare Books?

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Online exhibit, "The Art of African Exploration".

Last year, I cataloged part of a unique collection at the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Libraries—the Russell E. Train Africana Collection. This blog post was inspired by a series of conversations about descriptions of the collection materials that already existed and how Field Book Project catalog records would utilize and add to them. If you have the chance to look at the Train Collection exhibition website, “The Art of African Exploration”, you might ask the question I used to entitle this post. If the materials are already described, why was I there cataloging them? When I first looked at the existing item descriptions, I began to wonder. However, when I started looking at the items themselves, I realized that the way we catalog would indeed add new descriptive information to what already existed.

A collection like this, which includes archival materials, objects, and print materials, is a challenge for any institution to house and catalog. Each of these types of materials is usually associated with a specific type of institution. Primary documents usually go to archives, objects to museums, and published materials to libraries. Each type of item comes with its own challenges for description and housing; each type of institution has developed their own ways of meeting these challenges.

Cover page of Sir John Kirk’s “Butterflies collected in the Shire Valley, East Africa.” Russell E. Train Africana Collection at the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

Four types of descriptions for items within the Train collection existed before I began cataloging.

1. Book description: tailored to published works, this describes items as self-contained, stand alone works.
2. Archival description: developed specifically for unpublished works, this emphasizes contextual information and relationships among parts of the collection.
3. Conservation description: intended for items in need of conservation, this notes physical deterioration and possible conservation treatments.
4. Booksellers description: created to sell items, this focuses on physical description, history (historical significance), and value.

Verso of page 22 from Volume 2 of the 8 journal set by N. C. Cockburn. Part of the Russell E. Train Africana Collection.	Page 23, volume 2

Given these four types of descriptions you’re probably wondering what my cataloging added to the mix. The Field Book Project cataloging structure is a mixture of library and archival approaches, which fits well with some of the cataloging challenges in the Train collection. In addition, we include information specific to natural history researcher needs.

Portion of page 80, discussing Cockburn journals, from catalog compiled for Russell E. Train. Courtesy of Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History.

For many of the items I cataloged, I started by using portions of existing descriptions to which I added relevant information. Here is where an example probably helps. Above is a description taken from page 80 of the catalog compiled for Russell E. Train. It describes the 8 volume set of journals written by N. C. Cockburn. Below is the bookseller’s description for the same set of journals.

Bookseller’s description of Cockburn text. Courtesy of Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History.

When I catalog, I focus on the following:

• reason the person is at a location
• type of collecting
• dates of the collecting event
• types of information recorded about the collecting event (e.g. weather, terrain, vegetation, collecting method)

Often the pre-existing descriptions include limited or no information like that types listed above, thus being enhanced by the field book specific cataloging methods I used.

The field notes within the Train collection are a good illustration of the inspirations and challenges for the Field Book Project. The wide variety of field book materials means they can be described as library materials or as archival collections. In the case of the Train collection, the field books had descriptions that were not specific to researcher needs. Our Project has worked with museum and archive professionals to develop a cataloging system to address the wide variety of formats and diverse information field books document.

Field Notes from a Termite Lady

By Emily Hunter, Field Book Project

I’m not a scientist. I appreciate nature, but I’m not someone who has dedicated my life to studying it. Maybe it is because I’m an outsider to the discipline that I’m absolutely fascinated by the range of topics that the fervent scientist pursues. Whatever you can think of… someone out there probably has a near-fanatical devotion to understanding it. And I mean really, think about it! What’s the most boring, uninteresting animal, plant, or rock you can imagine? I am willing to bet that someone somewhere finds it riveting. And thank goodness for that! If I were a scientist, I’d probably study something cute and furry, but I sure am glad that there are good people out there studying the worms and the not-so-cute things.

Photograph panorama showing collectors on the beach where termite infested driftwood was found. Little Cayman, Cayman Islands, February 17, 1995. SIA Acc. 01-038, Box 1, Folder 13. No negative number.

I just couldn’t fathom the motivation for entomologist Margaret Collins’s passion for termites. Margaret Collins was so enthralled with termites that she observed them, wrote about them, collected them, even ate them. I just so happened to read all about it in her field notes, part of the collection “National Museum of Natural History (U.S.) Dept. of Entomology, Curatorial Records, 1959-1996” (SIA Acc. 01-038).

Why was I surprised that Margaret Collins was obsessed with termites? Maybe part of it was that what I learned about Margaret Collins herself made me see quickly that she was a fascinating woman! Logically it would follow…fascinating person, must be studying fascinating things. And so, with an open mind, I read her field notes.

Dr. Margaret Collins

Image of Dr. Collins, printed in “National Trust for the Cayman Islands 1992 Annual Report”. SIA Acc. 01-038, Box 1, Folder 13. No negative number.

First, some background on Collins. Margaret Collins, affectionately known as “the termite lady” to friends and colleagues, was declared the first African-American female entomologist by the Entomological Society of America (Peters, 2010, p. 654). She was born in 1922 in Institute, West Virginia, where she grew up in a well-educated family. Collins was interested in nature from a young age, observing and collecting small animals in the creek near her house. She was extraordinarily gifted and graduated from high school early in 1937. Margaret Collins was just 14 years old when she enrolled in college.

Collins studied zoology at West Virginia State University and went on to earn her PhD in 1949 from the University of Chicago. Her accomplishments are many, including discovering Neotermes Luykxi. She held professorships of zoology at Howard University, Florida A&M, and Federal City College. In the late 1970’s Collins came to the National Museum of Natural History as a Research Associate where she worked to organize the termite collection.

I can only imagine what Collins faced as an African-American and a woman scientist through the decades, including the struggle for civil rights and equality during the 1950s-1970s. In an interview with Black Women Scientists in the United States author Wini Warren, Collins said, “Because of my family and our community I had a unique childhood. I never learned what I couldn’t do—as a child, as a woman, or as a Black person.” (p. 52).

Collins felt most at home in the field. She traveled to Belize, Dominica, Guyana, Cayman Islands, Suriname, Bahamas, and British Virgin Islands collecting and studying termites. She did not allow age to slow her down, continuing to work in the field into her 70s. In 1996, on a field trip to the Cayman Islands, Margaret Collins passed away.

The Fascinating Termite

Photographs taped together to show termite-infested driftwood, Little Cayman, Cayman Islands, February 17, 1995. SIA Acc. 01-038, Box 1, Folder 13. No negative number.

In her field book, Collins wrote with admiration about the termite’s ability to digest wood. I decided to investigate termites a little more.

It turns out that despite their bad rap as destructive pests, termites are ecologically beneficial in some ways: they recycle nutrients, clear up organic debris (rotting limbs and leaves), and create hollowed spaces that other animals might call home. They also have pretty interesting social structures. Termites are eusocial animals that, like ants, have societies with various roles like soldiers, workers, and queens. Termites build complex nests using a mixture mud, feces, and saliva. Have you seen a termite cathedral mound? Just take a look at the sophisticated engineering of this structure.

Cathedral Termite Mound, home to a colony of grass eating termites, Nasutitermes triodiae. Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia. Photo by J Brew, via Wikimedia Commons.	Eastern subterranean termite soldiers (Reticulitermes flavipes KOLLAR). Photograph is in the public domain. Via United States Department of Agriculture on Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe Margaret Collins was right about termites! By the end of the collection, I have to admit, I was starting to think termites were pretty cool. Fortunately, Margaret Collins studied these creatures, learned about them, wrote about them, and most importantly, paved the way for others to do the same. Thank you, Termite Lady!

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References:

Peters, J. G. (2010). Bill Peters and Entomology at Florida A&M University. Florida Entomologist, 93(4), 654. Available online at: http://journals.fcla.edu/flaent/article/view/76176/73834

Termite Expert Margaret Collins Dies During Trip. (1996, May 5). The Washington Post, p. B9.

Warren, W. (1999). Black Women Scientists in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Learn more about termites!

The Incredible Termite Mound (PBS)

Faster than a Speeding Bullet (Smithsonian Magazine)

Termite Bellies and Biofuels (Smithsonian Magazine)

Older Termites Blow Themselves Up to Protect Their Colony (Smithsonian Magazine)