SciCafe: Museum Library Collections Unleashed!

TOM BAIONE (Harold Boeschenstein Director of Library Services): Thank you for coming out tonight to hear about the Museum’s library. Did everyone know that the museum had a library? Did you know that we’re one of the largest and finest libraries of our kind in the world?

The monogram you see on the screen is one of the earliest symbols of the museum. It was used on printed tickets and invitations in the first decades of the Museum’s existence. And if you look closely you can see the Museum’s initials, AMNH. And it’s good that I’m putting this up, because I may refer to the Museum as AMNH rather than the American Museum of Natural History.

This is the Museum’s sesquicentennial which is another way of saying we’re 150 years old. We were founded in 1869 and our charter states that we were founded as a museum and as a library. The library collections have been growing and diversifying over these last 15 decades.

We have about 550,000 volumes and we add over 1,000 printed volumes each year. We used to add more before we went electronic.

We subscribe to electric journals to support our scientists’ work and we make these resources available for library visitors as well. 

Our oldest book dates to 1490, and we have extensive rare book collections numbering 15,000 volumes.

What makes our collection additionally exceptional, if that’s possible, are the library’s non-print collection. these include photographs, film, archival material, manuscripts, art, and museum memorabilia. In general, these collections grow from internal transfers from other Museum departments.

All of the projects I’m going to discuss tonight have a free online presence on the library’s website. So I encourage you to visit. I’m going to dive in and talk about one of the ongoing projects in the library.

The Darwin Manuscript Project digitizes handwritten pages of Darwin’s scientific writings, transcribes the text, and creates a new edition of the text annotated with symbols, endeavoring to explain why certain words or phrases were changed, moved, or deleted. Ultimately the project staff presents the digitized images and annotations on a public-facing website. freely accessible to all users. And on the left side of the screen here you can see the digitized image of one of the pages from On the Origin of Species, that’s one of the manuscript pages.

That also happens to be in the Museum’s collections. Most of the images in the Darwin Manuscript Project don’t exist here in the Museum, most of them are held by Cambridge University. but there are a few that have snuck out over the years or just never made it there. And on the right side is the transcription.

This library-based effort has been successful, receiving funding from private and federal grants and is led by a historian of science and Darwin scholar. The effort has completed work on the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation-funded efforts to digitize and transcribe, so far, 36,000 pages of Darwin manuscripts and will soon seek funding to complete their work on the last large bodies of Darwin manuscripts that include Darwin’s field notes from the Beagle, Beagle specimen catalogs, and other diaries and geology notes.

Part of Darwin’s process was to write short notes on multiple topics on a single sheet of paper and then when he ran out of space he would cut or tear the sheets apart and file the individual notes by subject with other little fragments on the same topic and then when he wanted to write about that topic, he could take out that folder and he had all these ideas and citations he could begin to craft into something else.

Thousands of these fragmentary notes survived, but it’s never been known which notes were written together on the same sheet of paper.

The library’s 2016 “Hack the Stacks” Hackathon event featured a challenge to piece together these fragments. Volunteer developers created a proof of concept solution, an algorithm that examined the cut or torn edges of these fragments to suggest matches. And today the Darwin Manuscript Project has been able to virtually reunited a dozen of these sheets that previously had no connection, shining a new light on the process of Darwin’s work.

In commemoration of the museum’s 150^th anniversary, the library launched a collection of over 3,000 images documenting the museum’s historic halls or permanent exhibits.

A browse through these images will undoubtedly turn up some surprises, even for the most ardent fan of the Museum. Some of these halls featured still persist, while others we might term extinct. For instance, who knew we had an Oil Geology Hall in the 50s and 60s? We also provide a list of halls and by searching on the Hall of Public Health, we can see images of the hall itself, as well as images of components of that exhibition hall, including these wonderful models of insects–flies and mosquitos.

We’re going to take a big jump from the library authorities to the Shippee-Johnson Peruvian expedition of 1931. Once collection among our many photographic collections is the Shippee-Johnson photographic collection. This documents a pioneering aerial photographic surveying expedition to Peru by geologist Robert Shippee and navy pilot George Johnson.

These guys literally cut a hole into the belly of their plane and stuck a large format camera on top that produced 8x10 inch negatives, that’s about the size of this piece of paper. For those of you unfamiliar with traditional photographic negatives, eight by ten is massive and about the largest format that can be used in the field. About 36,000 photographs were produced, mostly aerials, but also images depicting people, architecture, and ruins seen from the ground.

The aerial images document settlements, land use, archeology sites, ruins, physical features, glaciers, volcanoes, and unusual landforms. The production of these overlapping large format images were a technical feat of the era when other pioneering aviators were just beginning to employ aerial surveys to document and

The incidental inclusion of glaciers make these extremely valuable to scientists today. Preservation of these negatives is challenging as they were made on now fragile and potentially combustible nitrate film.

We’re scanning these eight by ten negatives at 1700 dpi, resulting in extremely detail-rich 230-megabyte files for each negative. These images document a landscape that has been greatly altered in the interceding 90 years by a variety of human activities but also by natural landslides, erosion, and earthquakes.

There’s been a great research interest in these images from several directions, including a geologist studying glaciers, an archeologist Steve Wernke from Vanderbilt University, whose responsible for the animation we’re about to see made from the Shippee-Johnson images exclusively.

So these interested parties have supported our digitization efforts and we’re in the midst of scanning more. Our goal is to make the resulting digitized images available to additional interested researchers.

This summer, teams in plans and drones worked above Peru worked to create updates to these baseline 1931 images. Just another example of the long reach of our collections.

So this in as animation made from–two animations we’re going to see made from only a small number of images from the Shippee-Johnson collection, just to give you an idea of how rich these overlapping large format 1931 negatives are. These glaciers don’t exist there anymore and some of these ruins in the Colca valley may not appear as they did almost 90 years ago.

Pretty wild.

Massachusetts born Nicholas Pike was the US consul to Mauritius from 1866 to 1872 where he made extensive collections of Indian Ocean fishes and collaborated with local artists to document his discoveries. His important work was a milestone in the early study of the natural history of these islands east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.

Mauritius was also home to the ill-fated dodo bird, just to give you some context historically. Curiously, the zoological specimens Pike collected found their way to Harvard university’s museum of comparative zoology. While the volume of paintings and notes related to those same specimens were acquired by then AMNH trustee JP Morgan and later given to the Museum’s library. Keep your eye on the little right guy in the upper right corner, because he’s going to come back on a future slide.

The eight volumes of paintings, drawings, and manuscript notes survived all this time, but were in extremely rough condition, presenting numerous conservation challenges. Renewed recent interest in Pike and serendipitous funding from a friend of the library, supported the library conservation laboratory’s treatment of the largest and most endangered volume of this group.

Here you can see it before treatment, and here’s what it looks like now. Our expert conservators worked to ensure the integrity of the notes and art and after treatment, the individual pages were encapsulated in mylar, matted and rehoused. We were also able to digitize the album pages and make them accessible online through our image portal digital special collections. Thanks to continued support conservation work on additional Pike volumes continues.

Research interest in these volumes arose as the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Mauritius began preparations for celebrating the bicentennial of Pike’s birth.

The Mauritian festivities commemorating Pike’s birth included an exhibit featuring reproductions of many of the album’s pages and an academic symposium on Pike’s work. Mauritius also issued a postage stamp with an image from one of the Museum’s albums depiction the once common local damselfish, Pomacentrus pikei, the one you saw on an earlier slide.

In 1926, AMNH artist William Robinson Leigh traveled to east Africa with taxidermist and artist Carl Akeley to document environments to be depicted in what is not the Akeley Hall of African mammals. Lay produced this six-foot-wide study for the background of the African wild dog group in 1927.

When a dozen paintings and objects from the library were requested for a loan to a contemporary art gallery traveling to Paris and Frankfurt, it became clear that years of hanging in smoky offices here in the Museum had given this painting and unnaturally dark, nicotine-y hue. We were fortunate that a foundation interested in art conservation happened to call and generously support a thorough cleaning before their European tour looking pretty pristine.

In conclusion, this is an extremely exciting time for the library and I am very, very, very fortunate to have dedicated, creative colleagues, who are all up to the challenge of continuing the library’s proud and long tradition of supporting our researchers and increasing access to our diverse and important collections.