Rinaldo, ConstanceRielinger Legault, DianedeVeer, JosephCastronovo, Danielle2023-05-192023-03-14Rinaldo, Constance, Diane Rielinger Legault, Joseph deVeer, Danielle Castronovo. "Connecting Libraries, Archives, and Museums." Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 16, no. 1 (2023): 1-24. DOI: 10.1145/35709051556-46731556-4711https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37375260Over the last two decades, libraries and archives of natural history museums and botanical gardens in the US have spent major efforts to digitize their holdings. However, transporting these digitized resources from individual repositories to a wider community of researchers is challenging. Many of the primary resources are handwritten which limits their use and reuse because cursive writing and personal shorthand are difficult to decipher and the documents mostly lack machine readable data. This paper presents three case studies from the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) Botany Libraries and the Harvard University Ernst Mayr Library and Archives (EMLA) of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) that utilize crowd-sourcing, detailed access and discovery tools, and open access platforms to make handwritten materials more accessible to researchers by bridging content across collections held within and outside of Harvard University. The case studies show that different approaches can yield opportunities for mining data because transcription of handwritten documents and enhanced metadata allows searching previously unavailable words and phrases such as taxonomic names. Content contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the tools and services available in the BHL were integral to the work. The end result shows how information held in natural history libraries and archives contributes to the expansion of scientific and cultural historical knowledge by increasing access to previously unavailable historical scientific information through digitization, metadata enhancement and transcription.en-USComputer Graphics and Computer-Aided DesignComputer Science ApplicationsInformation SystemsConservationJournal Article2023-05-1910.1145/3570905Constance Rinaldo, Diane Rielinger, Joseph deVeer, and Danielle Castronovo. 2023. Connecting Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Collections in Support of Natural History Science. J. Comput. Cult. Herit. 16, 1, Article 3 (March 2023), 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3570905