Followers of Exploring may have caught a personal reference in a previous blog post when I mentioned a July camping trip with my husband-to-be in connection with introducing historical photographs of Itasca State Park. In a recent honeymoon brainstorming session,…
As I mentioned yesterday, dozens of negatives in the Bell Museum records aren’t about nature, but are of a personal nature as they contain images of Thomas Sadler Roberts’s family. The presence of family portraits amongst portraits of birds and…
The past few Mondays we shared peculiarly labelled images from the negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records. These “mystery” negatives are labelled with an “M” along with a number inconsistent with the approximately 6,000 negatives that are…
Yesterday, February 5th, was National Weatherperson’s Day, a holiday that honors the birth of John Jeffries, one of the first men in America to record daily weather observations, which he began doing in 1774. While the never ending below-zero temperatures…
Followers of the Exploring blog will recognize that since we began the project we’ve been exposed to a lot of birds due to the content of the collections that we are scanning. When you digitize and process the personal and…
Last week, I shared a post about a little quirk we’ve encountered with the collection of negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records. A set of negatives, contained within the last six drawers of the 56 drawers that…
Today marks the celebration of Chinese New Year – the beginning of the Year of the Horse. Though Chinese culture is not well represented in the collections of the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, which is the primary subject…
Walter J. Breckenridge captured this young coyote with his still camera in Milbank, South Dakota (just across the border to Minnesota) on June 8, 1935. (Images from the negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records)…
An excerpt from My Life in Natural History, by Walter J. Breckenridge, former preparator (1926-1946) and director (1946-1970) of the Bell Museum of Natural History, illustrated by images from the Bell Museum records at the University Archives: “Back in the…
On May 29, 2013, the student scanners in Digital Library Services (DLS) began scanning Drawer #1 of the 56 drawers that contain the more than 6,000 glass plate and film negatives in the Bell Museum records. A mere 8 months…