Connecting Content grant award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Academy Library is proud to announce that we have just been awarded a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for our project titled Connecting Content! This year there were 211 applications and 34 projects were awarded funding. Click here to see all the National Leadership Grants that were awarded.

Connecting Content is an effort involving the California Academy of Sciences, Missouri Botanical Garden, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Harvard University Botany Libraries, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Library, the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History.  The project involves the digitization of field notebooks and natural history collections and the generation of metadata for these items. We will then develop the means to map and link these collections to one another and to published material in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results of these projects will be made available for harvesting, reuse, and repurposing without cost, and third-party web applications developed to best serve diverse user communities.  The final deliverables will include an enhanced community Smithsonian Field Book Registry, as well as workflow and procedures so that other institutions may contribute to this project.

Ochsner's 1905-06 Galapagos field notes

Our pilot project involves the digitization of field books and specimens from the Academy's 1905-06 Galapagos Expedition. The page above, from Washington H. Ochsner's geology field book, is one page of approximately 2,600 pages that we will digitize. Stay tuned to hear more about our project!

- Danielle

Archives and Digital Collections Librarian