A DOZEN YEARS OF DIGITIZING: CONNECTING COLLECTIONS WITH ALL THEIR DATA

Twelve years of digitizing collections at Milwaukee Public Musuem (MPM) has uncovered the quirks, mysteries and changes of 160 years of collecting and collectors. Working with original catalog books, fieldnotes, maps, museum reports, accession records, photographs and media interviews has filled in missing information and highlighted the richness of information scattered throughout the associated records.

MPM’s digitization projects focused on moving data related to the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian fossil collections into EMu Collection Management System. The fossils were collected over the past century by curators, research geologists, and amateur collectors. The fossil specimens are primarily marine invertebrate fossils from the Midwest and Great Lakes region. The collection's long history gave an opportunity to see the changes in data preservation over the last century. At MPM, handwritten records moved from the Wisconsin Natural History Society records to MPM departmental catalogs and later to multiple department catalogs split disciplines of Invertebrate Paleo, Vertebrate Paleo, Paleobotany, and Mineralogy. Information concerning the fossils was not all contained in the catalog books. Collector information in MPM catalogs was limited to last name and initials, but accession records, newspaper articles, museum reports and photographs enhanced the collector records. Geographic data such as highway locations, and place names changed over time. Quarries that operated over many decades had both names and locations shift. Using fieldnotes and hand marked field maps locality data was updated. Similarly, stratigraphic information has been updated and renamed multiple times over the years. Field maps and collecting notes, along with USGS lexicon and the Paleobiology database were employed to refresh the data. The efforts to digitize are making the collections more accessible and enhancing them by allowing easier connections to related materials.