Adapting digital humanities tools for biodiversity science: A case study in field notebook digitization and the Extended Specimen Network.

Resumen

Field notebooks represent invaluable primary sources of biodiversity information, yet their rate of digitization has lagged behind that of natural history specimens. This disparity stems from multiple challenges, including the perception of notebooks as personal rather than institutional records, their complex and idiosyncratic content, and the lack of standardized protocols for creating discoverable linkages between field notebooks and their associated specimens—a key component of the Extended Specimen Network concept. This paper presents a case study demonstrating an efficient, specimen-first protocol for digitizing field notebooks and establishing stable connections to the natural history specimens generated during collection events. The method was developed during curation of the salvaged Lord Fairfax Community College herbarium, which included 16 hand-written field notebooks indexed to its specimens. We adapted Omeka S, an open-source content management system designed for cultural heritage institutions, to host, view, and interpret the field notebooks within a publicly accessible digital framework. Our protocol involves three key components: 1) digitizing field notebooks and creating persistent linkages via Archival Resource Keys between notebook entries and indexed herbarium specimen records within the Symbiota database platform; 2) enabling reciprocal discovery between the associated digitized datasets for annotation and interpretation; and 3) describing these associations using controlled vocabulary, making them discoverable within Symbiota. This approach demonstrates how digital humanities tools can advance biodiversity science, particularly benefiting institutions seeking to leverage field notebook data to improve the accuracy and precision of their specimen records and to address biodiversity knowledge shortfalls. While most appropriate for field notebooks with predominantly indexed specimen collection events, our method maintains accessibility for future semantic annotation of illustrations and textual data not directly related to individual specimens.