While I don’t claim to have a photographic memory, my work over the past several months on the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History project has fine-tuned my ability to remember images. Having viewed over 12,000 images from negatives, lantern slides, and…
When we began scanning the Ned L. Huff Lantern Slide Collection a few months ago, we had very little knowledge of just who Ned Huff was other than that he was a botany professor at the University. Ned was…
So is this life as we know it now in Minnesota – life in the “polar vortex”? We are cold. We are exhausted by the sheer amount of effort required to put on so many layers and articles of clothing….
This week marked the start of the spring semester at the University of Minnesota, yet as the temperature remained below zero in the Twin Cities for most of the week, it didn’t feel very spring-like on campus. Thanks to former…
The New Year was especially exciting at the University Archives, as during the second week of 2014 the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History project surpassed 100,000 individual scans. To date, over 110,000 archival materials – photographs, negatives, pages from field notebooks,…
In honor of the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day earlier this week (Remember, remember the 5th of November!), I thought it would be appropriate to share something from across the pond. You may ask, with the Exploring grant focused on…
I was entering caption information for the botanical photographs in the Department of Botany collection. This involved matching the digital reference image on my computer screen to the physical mounted photograph on my desk, deciphering the hand-written plant identification scrawled…
While faculty from the Department of Botany explored the state to identify plant life in the early 1900s, department photographer C.J. Hibbard not only provided photographic documentation of their observations, but also took the opportunity to explore a bit of…
In addition to some flora, since it is Friday, let’s add some fun… The actual caption for this photograph from the Department of Botany collection reads, “Talus vegetation, lichens and small shrubs, Lake Superior region” Something tells me that…
We reached a milestone on the Exploring project this week – completion of metadata entry (to include scientific names, families, additional captions, and geographical locations) for the 2,273 mounted botanical photographs from the Department of Botany records. Now ends the…