Botany Volunteer Awarded High Honor

From Plant Press vol. 11 no. 1

For the second time in three years, a Botany volunteer has been awarded the Museum’s highest volunteer honor. At the recent Peer Recognition Awards Ceremony in December, Jim Harle received the Outstanding Volunteer Award from Acting Director Paul Risser. Four years ago, at the invitation of Collections Manager Rusty Russell, Harle began a project to catalog the collection of maps that had been assembled by Botany staff for almost 100 years. It was a task that began nearly from scratch because these maps had been virtually ignored for decades, and the sense of organization that may have existed previously was now non-existent. With guidance from Suzanne Pilsk in the Smithsonian Libraries regarding map standards, and with his own expert knowledge of data programming, Harle designed and built a map cataloging system that currently consists of more than 5,000 records covering almost 7,000 map sheets and 4,000 subjects.

To begin with, Harle needed to get an idea of the scope of the problem. More than 20 five-drawer map cases existed in the herbarium and the basement, and hundreds more maps turned up in various offices and labs in the Department. The geographic coverage of all the maps needed to be determined and a physical arrangement of the maps by region was begun. Many maps required physical conservation and were isolated from the others. Overcrowding was a serious issue and, with help from Linda Hollenberg, additional map storage was provided and duplicates were culled from the collection.

For each map, scores of data fields are filled in, including physical map information, subject data, and the all-important latitude and longitude of the four corners of the map. Harle developed a feature that allows a user to enter a global coordinate into the search field and the program uses these corner points to fetch all existing maps that contain that fixed coordinate. Map records are then presented to the user beginning with the most highly resolved. Another search feature employs clickable maps of continents to guide users to map records. In addition to the map data, high quality digital images of many of the maps have been produced. The entire application is currently available on the Department intranet and is available throughout the Museum. Eventually, this resource will be made publicly available.

Harle has never worked in isolation. He consistently seeks out opinions, new information, and, of course, maps. He has supervised many high school and college interns who have come to the Museum during school breaks specifically to work with him. The Division of Reptiles and Amphibians (Department of Vertebrate Zoology) and the Department of Invertebrate Zoology have recently enlisted Harle’s assistance in getting a handle on their respective map collections. In addition, because of the high profile Harle has given to maps, the Museum has just created a working group to look into how the National Museum of Natural History, in concert with the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL), should handle, inventory, and make available its vast map resource. The final chapter on this story has not been written, so we hope Harle remains a valuable member of the Botany (and the Museum) community. Congratulations, Jim.