The ability to read fieldnotes from the turn of the century, to view photographic images from those trips, and to map the collected specimens, will add significantly to the MVZ's research, education, and curatorial programs. This effort has direct relevance to the MVZ's Grinnell Resurvey Project, which aims to revisit over 200 sites in California to examine spatiotemporal changes in fauna in the context of natural or human-induced environmental trends.
Field notes: Thus far, ~45,000 pages of field notes (of an estimated 100,000 pages) have been scanned and are available online. Notes are searchable by author, year, and section title, but future developments and ongoing data capture will enable broader search capabilities. One such development is GReF, a web application that was developed to capture data from scanned notebook pages and to link those data to the MVZ specimen database.
Photographs: The museum's
collection of ~12,000 historic prints have been scanned for archiving
and access. Each print contains two scanned versions: a lower resolution
tiff (300 ppi) that shows the image mounted on a data card; and a higher
resolution tiff (1200 ppi) of the image without the card. Photographs have
been processed into three additional files for online viewing: lower
resolution jpeg, thumbnail, and tiled jpeg. The images and associated
metadata are accessible through both the Museum's specimen database
(Arctos) and the campus photo
repository (CalPhotos).
PREVIEW
MVZ HISTORICAL PHOTOS!
View a list of the first
4000 catalogued photographs, which highlights the Museum's earliest
photos (1907-1923). They can be browsed by image
number, year, or general
locality.
Read more
about these collections.
