[NHCOLL-L:2608] Online access to MVZ Fieldnotes

[Carla Cicero]

Hello all,

I apologize for the cross-posting if your on multiple lists. I am pleased 
to announce the first phase of a project to digitize historical materials 
(fieldnotes, photographs) in the collections of the Museum of Vertebrate 
Zoology. This project ("Digital MVZ") is funded by the National Science 
Foundation, and involves:

1) capturing metadata for MVZ's collection of archived fieldnotes (ca. 600 
volumes) and photographs (ca. 14,000 historical photos)
2) scanning an important subset of the fieldnotes (ca. 100 vols) and 
photographs pertaining to major pre-1950 collecting expeditions in California
3) referencing data on all pages and photographs from that subset of material.

Our data access site (http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/mvz/) now allows you to 
query metadata for our fieldnotes, and to browse pages for the selected 
subset of volumes (e.g., try a search for Author = "Joseph Grinnell"). This 
is the first phase of making these data accessible online - photos 
(metadata capture, digitization) will follow.

The next phase of this project involves developing a graphical referencing 
tool for referencing data on those pages and photos, including: people, 
localities and dates (i.e., "collecting events"), specimens collected, 
species observed (but not collected), and additional info such as whether 
the page contains a photo, annotated map, drawing, etc. Once we start 
referencing the pages, we will modify the query interface to allow more 
powerful searching. Eventually, the goal is to link specimens, fieldnotes, 
photos, and other information and to view those records visually using the 
BerkeleyMapper (http://berkeleymapper.berkeley.edu/run.php?).

Also note that we have added a query interface for our reprint collection, 
also accessible from the data access site. You  can also get to the query 
interfaces from our home page http://mvz.berkeley.edu/

As usual, we appreciate feedback.

Best,
Carla


**********************************************

Carla Cicero, Ph.D
Curator and Researcher
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
3101 Valley Life Sciences Building
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3160
PH: 510-642-7868
FAX: 510-643-8238
email: ccicero at berkeley.edu
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ccicero/
http://mvz.berkeley.edu/
http://ornisnet.org/