by Rebecca Morgan on
Frank M. Chapman on horseback at Miraflores, Colombia, April, 1911Recently the New York Times profiled an amazing resurvey project being done by scientists in Colombia, whose goal was to revisit collection locations first visited by AMNH staff some hundred years ago. The original expedition team was organized by well-known AMNH ornithologist Frank Chapman. Chapman travelled together with W. B. Richardson, Leo E. Miller, and artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes and documented their 1911-1912 trip by taking hundreds of photographs. This image collection documents the first of what became a series of expeditions to Colombia. The current resurvey team has been able to use several of the original images to rephotograph the same spots today, providing invaluable documentation of these places and enhancing understanding of how the land and populations living there have changed.
Our efforts over several years to make this amazing image collection available to the public include several long steps. First, we had to identify and then scan the original glass plate negatives which somehow, made it back to New York City from the Colombian rain forests. This fact alone makes this and all early field photograph collections amazing. The glass negatives are not only fragile but very heavy, tricky to move in the best situations yet alone some of the most challenging. Our next step was to add Chapman’s original data such as dates and captions to each picture. Finally, we add our current description terms which help to link the images together in our Digital Asset Management system. This allows people to browse through our images and see what other related images or items our collections hold.
New workflows allow us to create bridges for our users by adding (where we can) links in the image metadata that will bring them over to our other library and archive databases. The images end up acting as portals to the other interesting collections we hold about the expedition and the people on it.
To read the original AMNH expedition report and see the expedition photos follow the links below:
To learn more about the current Colombia Resurvey Project which includes efforts by scientists from the Instituto Humboldt, Universidad de Los Andes and Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Colombia, as well as the AMNH, University of California, Santa Cruz and Princeton in the U.S. see the resources below.
This entry was written by Rebecca Morgan, Special Collections Archivist.