Fourth Workshop on Scientific Archives Program of Events

Day one: June 5, 2024

8:30 – 9:30    Breakfast

9:30 – 9:50    Welcome and opening remarks with Dr. Catherine R. Lucey, MD, MACP, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

Note that some presentations will be recorded and shared after the workshop.

Session one: Open Archives

9:50 – 11:40

• Copyright inhibiting access: a novel collaboration with scientists to develop a new pathway to open archives at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives
• Ludmila Pollock and Stephanie Satalino, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives, United States
• In the scientific world, scientific meetings are hugely important as they serve as a major facilitator of communication and exchange of ideas among scientists. College and university research departments, as well as scientific institutions hold thousands of international scientific meetings yearly. Abstracts and/or videos from these meetings normally become collections in the hosting institution’s archives. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is recognized as one of the world’s premier hubs of activity in biology and genetics. CSHL hosts the esteemed annual Symposia in Quantitative Biology series which began in 1933. In addition to the Symposia, we have an additional 60 annual meetings on different topics that bring more than 10,000 scientists from around the world to the CSHL campus. In 1953, James D. Watson presented the structure of DNA for the first time publicly at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium. The idea for the Innocence Project, co-founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, came from CSHL’s 1988 Banbury meeting. The Human Genome Project roots date back to a 1989 CSHL meeting. Many successful projects were first presented at CSHL meetings and have since garnered international recognition: Lasker Awards, Breakthrough Prizes in Science, and Nobel Prizes. CSHL meetings have been recorded and stored in varied formats in the CSHL Archives for the past thirty years, as well as a print collection of annual meeting abstract books. These video and print collections document the development of molecular biology and present the enormous impact science has had on prolonging human life. Both collections are underutilized due to copyright restrictions. The collections would be of interest to students and educators in addition to scholars if open access was implemented. For now, we are trying to facilitate broader access; a prominent CSHL researcher proposed the creation of a small committee consisting of two laboratory executives, a historian, archivist, and a few researchers. This committee reviews abstracts and recorded talks and then makes selections based upon certain criteria of what can be made publicly available. With continued success, we plan to expand our methods. We are taking a risk-based approach to copyright, but will also be working to mitigate future risk by having presenters sign copyright release forms. We intend to share our newly developed project with the scientific archives community and look forward to comments and suggestions.

• ‘Armchair Archivists’: Enhancing Crowdsourced Historical Manuscript Transcription with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) Tools
• John R. Schaefer, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
• The growing use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tools across the cultural heritage sector allows archivists and researchers to conveniently translate digital images of handwritten documents into machine-readable text. In addition to making archival content more accessible, this process exposes manuscript corpora to a variety of digital research methods, from topic modelling to social network analysis. This paper proposes an open-source framework for HTR-assisted manuscript transcription in the context of academic and cultural heritage sector projects that rely on limited volunteer resources. How can archives best utilize these platforms to create public HTR models? What does integrating HTR tools mean for the unpaid volunteers who form the backbone of many transcription projects in a challenging funding climate? How might the use of HTR in these projects be situated within the broader embrace of openness and linked data in the social sciences and humanities? Focusing on the popular Transkribus and eScriptorium Virtual Research Environments (VREs), this project examined the practical and theoretical implications of a novel HTR-based crowdsourcing workflow integrating both platforms. The workflow was developed for a six-month volunteer initiative in collaboration with the Joseph Hooker Correspondence Project at Kew Gardens and the University of Cambridge, resulting in a public open-source HTR model for Joseph Dalton Hooker’s (1817–1911) handwriting. These findings demonstrate that integrating HTR tools into similar crowdsourcing workflows is a cost-effective strategy for smaller transcription projects to generate reusable HTR models within a limited timeframe. While a potentially problematic replacement for human expertise, open-source HTR tools help enhance the accessibility and relevance of archival data for a global audience. When carefully implemented in the context of volunteer crowdsourcing, HTR tools can facilitate deeper academic and public engagement with scientific correspondence and natural history collections — shedding new light, for example, on their extractive colonial histories. This paper also addresses fundamental issues of transparency and openness in archival transcription by showcasing the benefits of open-source software platforms and data management practices, alongside the expansion of Linked Open Data (LOD) frameworks in the transcription and annotation of correspondence, to enhance interoperability across archival collections. Finally, I evaluate the practical implementation of HTR tools using survey and interview data gathered from a diverse pool of volunteer transcribers, voicing complex sentiments toward HTR technologies and automation in the archives.

• Establishing a new paradigm in collaborations between archives and biological collections: creating the Carlquist Extended Specimen Network
• Ana Niño, Jason H. Best, Krishna Shenoy, Sam Ekberg, of Botanical Research Institute of Texas, United States
• Mare Nazaire and Sara Dave of California Botanic Garden, United States
• New initiatives in the digitization of scientific archives and biological collections have given rise to the Extended Specimen Network (ESN)–a conceptual framework that places biological specimens at its center and connects them to disparate types of archival materials, whether field photographs, field notes, maps, and more, to build a vast network of digital resources. The Herbarium at California Botanic Garden and the Library at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas have partnered in an effort to preserve and provide access to the collections of Sherwin J. Carlquist (1930 – 2021), an American botanist and photographer well known for his contributions to the fields of island biogeography, evolutionary ecology, and wood anatomy. The goal of the Carlquist ESN is to link Carlquist’s biological collections housed at California Botanic Garden and his archival collection housed at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. The Carlquist collection comprises more than 190,000 objects, including slides, photographs, negatives, field notebooks, microscopic slides, herbarium vouchers, wood specimens, and specimen material preserved in spirits. This project aims to curate the comprehensive Carlquist collection for long-term preservation; digitize and mobilize the collection’s data; and link transcribed collection information, images, and metadata across all biological collections and archival objects–to publish and make publicly available through four open-access platforms. The Carlquist ESN has the potential to provide “additional physical preparations and digital resources,” (Lendemer et al, 2020) facilitating immediate application to a suite of research areas, including systematics, wood anatomy, ecology, biogeography, island biology, phenology, plant conservation, history of science, plant humanities, digital humanities, and archival theory and practice. The Sherwin Carlquist Collection ESN project represents a unique opportunity for the collaboration of two different but interconnected disciplines to shepherd a new paradigm in the way in which the biological and archival communities envision, implement, and utilize ESNs within and between their collections. Outreach opportunities, challenges and lessons learned during the forging of this ESN will also be highlighted in this talk.

11:45 – 12:45    Lunch

Session two: Collections as Data

12:45 – 14:05

• Presentation withdrawn
• The Perrey Archive: a Tool for Historical Seismology
• Corinna Guerra, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
• The Perrey Archive, a unique historical collection of documents on natural disasters of the past, is preserved in the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria library. This collection is the result of the tireless research of French scientist Alexis Perrey (1807-1882), who is regarded as one of the founders of seismology. I will reconstruct how it was collected and the events that brought it to Italy.

• Linking Analog Archival Data Across Anthropology’s Four Fields
• Amanda H. Sorensen, Diana E. Marsh, Katrina Fenlon, Nikki Wise, University of Maryland, United States
• Celia Emmelhainz, Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives, United States
• As scientific evidence, anthropological archives are unique and irreplaceable. For the past 150 years, anthropologists worldwide have documented complex lifeways, languages, embodied cultures, and communities in flux, in far greater detail than ever available in a published form (Silverman 1995: 1). While contemporary research often generates born-digital archives (Sanjek & Tratner 2016), most of anthropology’s evidential record survives as textual, image, and audio evidence located in brick-and-mortar institutions, or in scattered offices and labs (Ruwell 1995; Zeitlyn 2022). Yet despite efforts to build data repositories and born-digital archives (Cliggett 2013), the data embedded in anthropology’s physical archives are still largely disconnected from the networked systems of discovery and access that support scientific research and reuse. This session discusses how archives can more effectively make primary sources reusable as data to support active research in scientific and social scientific disciplines. Our study aims to highlight in part how we might balance Indigenous data sovereignty and cultural sensitivity with networked discovery and access (“Building a sustainable future for anthropology’s archives: Researching primary source data lifecycles, infrastructures, and reuse,” PI Diana Marsh, NSF CA-SR award #2314762). This study builds on two strands of prior work: first, “Recovering and Reusing Archival Data for Science” (USDA, PI Katrina Fenlon), which explores scientific data recovery and reuse of historical data from archives and legacy research materials; and second, a collaboration between the Council on the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) and the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA) aimed at improving the visibility of scientific archival collections using Wikidata. We look for ways to transform data platforms to integrate Indigenous stewardship and community-based knowledge, or what we term reparative linked data. Building on this framework, we discuss what we’ve learned from our current NSF project, which asks how anthropology’s analog sources—such as fieldnotes, photographs, and audiovisual materials—can become more findable, reusable data sources for contemporary research questions. We discuss our progress in identifying best practices for scientific archival information infrastructure, evaluating test collections in cross-disciplinary open-access platforms, and developing training modules for anthropologists and data curators. Through dialog, we hope to facilitate discussion about 1) how historical archives are currently being used by scientists and social scientists, and 2) connecting these projects with others in archival infrastructure or practice for data reuse, especially in the global social sciences.

• Use and Usefulness: Documenting Archival Data
• Anjali Ramachandran and S. Prashant Kumar, Archives at NCBS, National Centre for Biological Sciences-Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India
• Using two collections held by the Archives at NCBS, the first of an early space scientist T.S.G. Sastry, and the second a mathematician, B.S. Madhava Rao, we report on a collaboration between a historian of mathematics and an archivist of science. The Archives at NCBS is the only public collecting centre for the history of science in contemporary India. Archiving the history of science in India presents unique challenges. The archives of scientific institutions in the post-independence period are rare, often poorly conserved, and largely uncatalogued, meaning that procedures for appraisal, arrangement, and description have to be worked out from scratch. Sastry and Madhava Rao themselves, while adjacent to major figures and scientific personalities, were not themselves well-known. Without both historical and scientific context-setting, these collections offer only a blinkered view into science in practice. Setting context in the absence of the large-scale preservation of scientific papers in India—as is the norm in the global north—means what are usually simple archival tasks often require specialist or subject matter expertise. For example, since the Madhava Rao collection was posthumously donated, the papers were given no original order by their author. Collaboration made it possible to identify cases where relevant context had been preserved. Where it had not, subject matter knowledge was required to follow mathematical proofs and calculations and reestablish relations between disaggregated materials. In these two collections, there were several appraisal and arrangement choices made in order to preserve context which shows relationships between concurrent strands of scientific thinking. We argue for a difference between the preservation of data still of use to present-day science, and the preservation of apparently orphaned or damaged data. The preservation of microfilm data showing variations in the earth’s magnetic field might be of use to scientists, but damaged slides which may be of no use to science are still of historical value for what they may reveal about larger scientific networks. Such an appraisal standard requires subject matter expertise, knowledge of relevant historiography, and an archivist’s sense of the limitations and purview of the archive itself. Collections and archives may well be data, but there is an important and subtle difference between the appraisal and preservation of scientific data and historical data, which requires equitable collaboration between archivists, historians, and subject-matter experts.

Session three: Scientific Museums and Archives

14:05 – 15:05

• Scientific Archives and Museum Collections: an Integrated Vision
• Patrícia Costa, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, P. Porto, Portugal
• Milena Carvalho and Susana Martins, Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, CITCEM, Portugal
• The Museum of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Polytechnic of Porto, houses an important collection of scientific instruments of great scientific and pedagogical quality that clearly reflects a great deal of scientific knowledge about the circulation of new ideas and techniques, which allowed a country like Portugal to develop industrial education and experiential training, with reference to the most technically developed countries, as France, England and Germany. Due to its characteristics and underlying history, this museum collection is of considerable historical and scientific interest for the study of the different teaching methods practiced in industrial education in the city of Porto, even when compared to today’s standards. However, it cannot be dissociated from an important set of documents that proves all the school’s administrative activity, as well as the record of scientific activity carried out in the different subjects at the school between 1852 and 1974 – the Historical Archive. In our opinion, all these elements should be seen in an integrated way, thus forming the basis of the information system (IS) with a focus on the digital information potential, creating a digital service that contributes to efficient management of all the heritage information produced in a museum context. All information resources are important insofar as they all, with their commonalities or specificities, generate knowledge about collections and heritage. Although the fundamental part of a museum’s IS is centered on its collection, it must also include the processing and availability of information associated with the historical archive and documentation center and other data on the institution that is considered relevant, allowing for a perfect and transparent articulation between the three aspects. In this way, we consider the museological object to be a document, since it is part of a chain of contexts, links and connections, and is an informational envelope. The work presented here is an explanatory study because it aims to provide in-depth knowledge of the subject in question, based on a literature review and documentary research. The conclusion is that an integrated approach allows for greater and more in-depth knowledge of the activities of producing organizations and their information objects, regardless of their nature, analogical and digital. This text is financed by National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, within the scope of the project UIDB/04059/2020.

• Collaboration between archivists and scientists at the American Museum of Natural History
• Maya Naunton and Kiana Clark, American Museum of Natural History, United States
• The archive at the Vertebrate Paleontology Department of the American Museum of Natural History has grown organically over the 130-year existence of the department. While there have been efforts to organize and process the papers in the past, the majority of the archive has not been processed. An IMLS grant received by the department in 2020 supports the effort to process the papers in the archive and make them accessible to researchers. Our presentation seeks to address multiple themes outlined in the Workshop announcement. 1. Close collaboration required between archivists and the members of the scientific staff. This collaboration helps the archivists understand the material and to organize it in a way that will benefit the future researchers. The collaboration in turn, helps the scientific staff to understand what the archive contains and how it can be helpful to their work. 2. Accessing the barriers for creating of open archives. The grant stipulates that the results of the work should be available to the public and the finding aids are posted to the publicly accessible archive catalog. However, there are some issues with making all of the material open to the public. Besides the usual consideration of privacy, there are some instances where the department has concerns with making fossil find spots widely known. This requires an extensive dialog between the archivists and the science staff to create an acceptable policy on restrictions. 3. The information in the archives is not currently correlated with the collection database. We are working on creating a situation where it will be possible to connect specific specimens to material in the archive and thus open up a new way to analyze the collection, mining it for new insights into the history of collecting, paleoecology, and possible relationships between specimens that are not obvious currently.

15:05 – 15:30    Coffee/tea break

Session four: Medical Archives: Ethics of Preservation and Access

15:30 – 16:30

• Beyond the Walls and Changing the Space of Archive Through the Lens of The Adler Museum of Medicine in South Africa
• Samuel Umoh Uwem, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic
• Adetola Elizabth Umoh, University of Autonomous Barcelona, Spain
• Governments seeking to make their records widely accessible to their citizens through open data and open knowledge are prioritizing digitization projects.   In South Africa digitization efforts are directed, in part, at the large and expanding volumes of medical records that are frequently kept in museums, archives, and other institutions. Notably, memory institutions such as South Africa’s Adler Museum of Medicine have been engaged in preserving the history of the health sciences throughout Southern Africa, with particular reference to Gauteng. The Adler Museum of Medicine, founded in 1962, is situated in the South African Institute for Medical Research, Johannesburg, and contains a Library section and a Collections Center. The latter houses collections on the history of medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy; while the former houses an archive of the biographical information of several medical and allied health professions, which is available to students, researchers and members of the public. The Museum augments the educational activities of the University, especially the Health Sciences, with its collections, research, teaching, exhibitions, and publications. Drawing from the Adler Museum of Medicine in South Africa, this paper briefly provides an overview of the Center’s, functions and of the legislation that governs the archives housed at the museum. The paper examines how archival practice through digitization strengthens or undermines provenance and original order. It analyses the migration to digitization of objects; the procedures, conditions, and reasons that influence the choice to include or exclude medical archives; and how they incorporate these insights into the design, functionality, and affordance of their digital archives. It highlights how medical museums, through the activities of the separate units of Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum approach and foster open access to medical archives. Drawing from oral history, archival sources, documentaries and interviews in South Africa, this paper argues that since COVID-19, the medical museum archives is simultaneously trying to digitize its holdings and maintain the physical originals.  However, there are concerns amongst Archives and Records Management (ARM) practitioners about a coming digital dark age: a phenomenon where a significant amount of important cultural heritage is lost due to both rapid digitization of information and lack of reliable long-term preservation methods.

• Curating the Clinical: 20th Century Photographs and 21st Century Methods in Cape Town’s Medical Archive
• Michaela Clark, University of Manchester; UCT Pathology Learning Centre, United Kingdom and South Africa
• This paper offers an overview of a doctoral project conducted at the University of Cape Town’s Pathology Learning Centre. The project endeavored to assess, sort and study a collection of almost 6000 disused clinical photographs created by South Africa’s first medical school between 1920 and 1967. These records depict the bodies of local patients via various representational modes: frontal and profile images of heads, veiled limbs and torsos, disembodied organs, as well as x-rays are featured in black and white, mounted on cardboard backings, and annotated with details of both persons and signs of disease. Produced in urban hospitals in the temperate Cape, both the depictive practices and the diseases featured echo those of the metropole – all despite the highly unequal socio-political as well as clinical context of the South Africa at the time. When the project began in 2019, little information regarding the making, use, or original order of this collection existed. It was, for all intents and purposes, ‘orphaned’ in that it suffered from a lack of contextualising data, its origins remained uncertain, and its custody was fundamentally precarious. The collection thus had what Diane Vogt-O’Connor (2006:115) calls a ‘high maintenance mortgage’ – it posed too many problems and required too many resources to make it viable for research purposes. In addition, its uncertain provenance saw it plagued by ethical questions with regards to clinical consent (in the past) and research access (in the present). In order to grapple with these difficulties, the project applied a method of archival treatment to the collection that saw its contents systematically ‘curated’ (Voss 2012; Voss & Kane 2012). By framing the photographs as not only visual but as material culture (Edwards & Hart 2004; Caraffa 2018; Bärnighausen et al 2020), they were conterminously archived (assessed, organised, and described) and subjected to provenance research. This paper offers an overview of the theoretical and methodological concerns and solutions related to transforming these decontextualized settler-colonial clinical photographs into a historical resource. The process of object-management and the tracing of its ‘social life’ (Appadurai 1986) allowed for its historical roots and contemporary use to be unearthed. However, it also provided glimpses of the fraught racialized context of its production. In addition to outlining a means to render orphaned photographic collections of medicine useful to the historian, this paper thus further demonstrates the value of material of this kind for grappling with the representational politics and ethical complexities posed 20th-century clinical photographs in the settler-colonial context.

16:30 – 17:30    Tour of UCSF Library and Archives and Special Collections Exhibits and Collections

17:30 – 19:00  Social hour at Fireside Bar, 603 Irving St. San Francisco, CA 94122