USAIN/CBHL 2024 Biennial Meeting

Beyond Blooms: Exploring the Multi-Faceted Significance of Seed and Nursery Catalogs in Historical Research
Erin Aults (Royal Botanical Gardens)
Kristen Mastel (Andersen Horticultural Library, University of Minnesota, Minnesota Landscape Arboretum)
Jocelyn Mehle (Andersen Horticultural Library, University of Minnesota, Minnesota Landscape Arboretum)

Historical seed and nursery trade catalog collections capture an elusive type of information. These catalogs were meant to exist no longer than a year or two, consulted heavily for a brief time and discarded once out of date. Today, librarians, archivists, and researchers view these collections as important primary source materials for numerous fields of study. While they are used primarily as a resource on the growth of ornamental horticulture and agriculture, they also serve as a portal into the social mores, political anxieties, local and national economies, the dinner table, farmer’s market, and florist shop.

Whether the users are searching for the introduction of invasive plants or artists looking for inspiration, some of the challenges and opportunities for librarians remain the same. Who are the researchers and what do they want to know? What are the trends we see in the catalogs that might be overlooked by researchers? How do we better facilitate discovery and access and attract more users? What has worked and what could we do better in promoting the use of the catalogs? What does it look like in a born-digital world and the archival processes? What are the challenges that lie ahead in acquisition, outreach, use, and preservation?

This presentation proposal will bring together the curators of two major collections of seed and nursery trade catalogs. These collections span four centuries, focusing on both United States and Canadian horticultural companies. The curators will discuss the questions posed above while determining a common path ahead for their collections and similar ones at similar institutions.

Communication, Collaboration, and Calibration: Steps Toward Materializing the Carlquist Extended Specimen Network
Ana Niño (Fort Worth Botanic Garden)
Krishna Shenoy (Fort Worth Botanic Garden)
Samantha Ekberg (Fort Worth Botanic Garden)
Jason Best (Directory of Biodiversity Informatics)

In an age where libraries and archives are increasingly turning toward digitization to enable virtual access to collections, the question of how to add value to digitized collections arises. With the support of National Science Foundation grant funding, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas Library has been strategizing and working with California Botanic Garden to link related botanical and archival materials created by Sherwin Carlquist, a mid-century American botanist—uniting these disparate collections and imbuing their contents with greater context in the process. Through this project, the BRIT Carlquist team is reckoning with challenging questions such as: How can a small team efficiently and adequately digitize and describe over 150,000 digital objects? What are cutting-edge digitization methods we can draw upon from related fields for high throughput digitization, and how can we quickly adopt these specialized skills? Who can we enlist to assist with this multifaceted project?

Extension Microfilm Digitization Project: Putting History Into Our Hands.
Inga Haugen (University Libraries at Virginia Tech)
Julia Westblade (University Libraries at Virginia Tech)
Meagan Russell (University Libraries at Virginia Tech)

The Virginia Cooperative Extension microfilm digitization project aims to create digital copies of and provide access to the agricultural reports of the state of Virginia. These primary source reports consist of the work of extension agents at the county-level from 1908 to 1968 for men and women from white communities and communities of color, including information regarding production and salaries. This paper will discuss the process of digitizing 141 reels of microfilm and making the contents accessible to researchers. The paper will highlight the methodologies and challenges experienced during the process as well as the importance of the data uncovered in the documents. It will give an overview of the effort it takes to provide access to primary resources that researchers need to uncover untold stories.

Digitization of the Microfilm
The original documents were scanned onto microfilm in the 1960s. The digitization lab at Virginia Tech's Newman Library has digitized, reformatted, sorted, and combined into text-searchable PDFs over 100,000 pages of county-level reports adhering to FADGI standards. The team had to document progress as the project moved through several stages of production before members of the team sorted through these PDFs to create item-level metadata to ensure the reports are findable and searchable.

Document Overview/ Importance
This set of microfilm was the most complete set in the state and in WorldCat, and had a reel guide of the counties and years for only 86 of the 141 reels. This project will bring to light individual reports, the authors, and the extension work that was happening in the whole state from 1908-1968. Because the authors include women and Black extension agents, this work brings local history into the hands of the communities we currently serve. As an example, a technician saw a report about her partner’s grandfather while processing the collection.