david null, director university archives and records management services university of...
TRANSCRIPT
David Null, DirectorUniversity Archives and Records Management ServicesUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
National Archives Preservation Conference, March 26, 2009
Considered by many as the father of wildlife management and of the United States’ wilderness system. Leopold was an educator, conservationist, forester, philosopher, writer, and outdoor enthusiast.
Author of A Sand County Almanac
Includes essay “The Land Ethic”
“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of land.”
Born in Burlington, Iowa , 1887
Attended Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, 1904/5
Attended Yale Forest School, receiving Master of Forestry, 1909
Joins U.S. Forest Service in 1909, assigned to Apache National Forest, Arizona Territory
Transfers to Carson National Forest, New Mexico Territory, in 1911. Instrumental in having Gila National Forest designated as first official wilderness area, 1924
Transfers to U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI in 1924
Accepts appointment to new chair of game management in the Department of Agricultural Economics, 1933
1939 becomes chair of new Department of Wildlife Management
Dies of a heart attack while fighting a grass fire on a neighbors farm, April 21, 1948
A Sand County Almanac published posthumously in 1949 by Oxford University Press
Donated to University Archives in 1960s
Some from Department of Wildlife Management, some from Leopold family
Collection consists of 27.6 cubic feet (83 archives boxes), 12 journals, 7 diaries, 1 scrapbook, 3 reels of microfilm, 5 folios, 3 cases, 1000 photos, and memorabilia.
Founded in 1982, by Leopold’s children: Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl, and Estella
Family’s literary rights assigned to the foundation
Who should apply: University Archives or Leopold Foundation?
Leopold Foundation was conducting a $7,750,000 fundraising campaign
Few private foundations seem to apply for these types of grants
Aldo Leopold Foundation applied for grant, in cooperation with the University Archives
Awarded two-year, $110,530 matching grant, Jan. 2007
The ALF hired the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center to do the digitization
UW-Madison General Library System/UWDCC agreed to donate $25,000 in scanning costs
UW Digital Collections Center in existence since 2001, currently funded by UW-Madison and UW-System
At the time of the application had digitized over 1,300,000 pages of text and over 40,000 images. Very good at estimating costs, timelines, etc.
So had very good infrastructure for the project
Already had an EAD guide to the collection, but needed revision
Hired a graduate student to go through the physical collection and also revise the EAD guide
No additional metadata was added
Online equivalent of paging through a folder or a journal
Digitized using UWDCC’s Electronic Facsimile Text (Pageturner/EFacs)
Images were done in JPEG 2000, so can zoom in closely
High resolution tiffs and metadata stored in 3 locations.
Graduate student went through all papers
Made sure materials were in order
Flattened, removed staples, etc.
Marked anything needing special attention
Took materials to digitization site
Brought materials back and reviewed them
Bill Meier, “On the Paper Trail with Aldo Leopold,” Leopold Outlook Winter 2008 http://www.aldoleopold.org/About/outlook/winter2008/paperTrail.shtml
Leopold wrote out, longhand, a first draft, and then he frequently attached to that draft small slips of paper that contained comments, criticisms, revisions, or references to maps and figures. Because of the poor state of much of the tape, staples, pins, paperclips, and other fasteners he used, each of these slips had to be removed (often they concealed the original writing beneath them). What followed was like putting together the pieces of a puzzle: we had to communicate with scanners how best to capture each stage of Leopold’s thought process in order to present to an online audience the evolution of his ideas from one version of an essay to the next.
Digitized journals/diaries first because of condition
heavily used, edges fraying, bindings loosening
many pages have small photos pasted in
lots of pencil maps, illustrations, etc.
Pine Cone
Game management bulletin published 1915-1931
4-page issues on newsprint, quite fragile
Conservation estimates from Wisconsin Historical
Society run from $650 - $5000 depending on treatment
Photographs: will be around 1000
Memorabilia:
http://digicoll-dev.library.wisc.edu/AldoLeopold/data/images/MmBib/LeopoldArchives/gallery_LeopoldArchives.html
Estimates from the UWDCC for digitization have been pretty accurate, actually somewhat lower than expected
Running about $ 1.40 per page (varies with type of material, e.g. journals vs. letter)
Includes actual scanning, plus document preparation, metadata, project management, quality control, etc. (total of 17 items)
Digitizing other Leopold materials:
Robert McCabe Collection
Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology
Collections from Leopold Foundation
Others
Most textual material is digitized, all live by April
Photos are the major remaining part
Leopold Foundation is working on their own web pages
Do more publicity and assessment
“I should add that the beauty of having this archive on-line was made abundantly clear when I looked into the Charles Elton papers at the Bodleian, with Julianne Warren. Nothing whatsoever is on-line, except a list of what they have, some of which looks potentially very important to her project and to mine (they are somewhat related). So one of us is going to have to go to Oxford to dredge this archive, and that's even harder than going to Madison. The contrasting experience with the 2 archives made me realize how digitizing archives will revolutionize research and make archives much more valuable.”