First Birds of Spring, 19th Century Version

Despite my lack of faith in the long-term durability of digital archives, it’s always nice to see digitization projects bringing resources out from dusty basement file cabinets to the light of a world-wide audience. One such project is the North American Bird Phenology Program. Housed in one of these proverbial file cabinets in Maryland is the Migration Observer Card collection, a set of about 6 million handwritten cards giving observations of the timings of the arrivals and departure of migrant birds. These observations were collected between 1880 and the Second World War by a network of up to 3000 birdwatchers. These observations are very valuable today because they help tell the story of how shifts in climate affect the distribution of animals.

Not having the funding to digitize the card files themselves, the biologists at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center where the collection is housed came up with the idea of crowdsourcing the project. They have started scanning the cards and are recruiting volunteers over the Web to transcribe the information on the scanned images. The project is barely a month old and already has over 400 volunteers. But more are needed, so if you are interested in helping see here.