a blog from the staff of the Wolbach Library
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Hi everyone! Sam and Nico here, the organizers of the the Zooniverse Star Notes project. We just wanted to take this time to express our immense gratitude. These are very difficult and uncertain times; we hope that all of our volunteers are safe and healthy. Taking care of ourselves and our loved ones are a …
In the mid-19th century, the popular exchange of current scholarship between academic institutions led to the creation of Harvard College Observatory astronomical literature collection. At that time, the materials were housed in the Phillips Library, where they remained into the early 20th century. The collection continued to grow, and in 1971 the HCO moved their …
Hi everyone! Sam and Nico here, from the Wolbach Library. One month ago, we launched our Zooniverse project Star Notes, a crowdsourcing project that continues the work of Project PHaEDRA. Can you believe that it’s already been a month since we launched our project? We are super grateful to everyone who has helped us so …
Hi everyone, We are happy to announce that a new project is now up on the Zooniverse website: Star Notes. This project is connected to Project PHaEDRA at the John G. Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The goal of Project PHaEDRA is to catalog, digitize, and transcribe over 2500 logbooks and notebooks …
We’ve created Twitter and Instagram accounts to keep you updated on Project Phaedra! Follow to learn more about our journey processing this collection, when new materials are available for transcription, and whatever neat highlights we find along the way. We’ve just sent our first batch of notebooks off to the imaging department at Harvard’s Widener Library. …
PHAEDRA has been accepted to the Smithsonian Digitization Fair! At our exhibit table, Wolbach librarians will be available to share information and developments in our efforts to digitize and transcribe astronomical logbooks from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The theme of this year’s Digitization Fair is “Bracing for Impact: Digitizing Collections to Change Lives!” Our …
The history the HCO is coming together before our eyes. With the many different catalogues of the PHAEDRA items that were composed over the past 40 years, we have been hard at work to find any books missing from our collection. Already, we recovered one orphan notebook from Widener Library’s holdings at Harvard Depository, and we are searching …
Over the past few months, our library staff has been working hard to unravel the mysteries of Project PHAEDRA. Consisting of over 100 boxes recently rediscovered that contain Harvard College Observatory’s notebooks, journals, and observations from the nineteenth century, this material has the potential to reveal aspects of the Observatory’s past that have long since …
Project PHAEDRA: Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy Recently, research material originally produced during the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory was re-discovered in the HCO Plate Stacks holdings. These early notebooks and other materials are absolutely irreplaceable. The material represents the history of the Harvard …