With the GBIF Governing Board Meeting and Science Symposium taking place last week, alongside celebrations of their 25th anniversary – Happy Birthday GBIF! – this seemed like great timing for our latest bhlat20 anniversary post.
Walter Faxon’s ornithological field journals, notebooks and bird lists contain thousands of observations recorded over 33 years, including species names, dates, localities and numbers of individuals observed. The Ernst Mayr Library has now digitised the collection and used AI-assisted tools to transcribe nearly 2,000 manuscript pages.
The ultimate goal is to make this species occurrence data discoverable and ultimately share it with GBIF, turning handwritten observations from more than a century ago into data that can contribute to our understanding of biodiversity change today.
This is a great example of the idea of collections as data, and of the biodiversity information still waiting to be unlocked from BHL’s collections.
Read the latest bhlat20 post by Joe deVeer, Co-Secretary of the BHL Executive Committee and Digital Projects Manager at the Ernst Mayr Library: Collections as data: Transcribing the ornithological observations of Walter Faxon
