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…
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…
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…
Over the course of the past eight months I have received a tour of the natural landscape of Minnesota as it appeared over one hundred years ago. The glass plate negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records and…
Associate Curator and Director were not the only titles that Thomas Sadler Roberts held during his tenure at the University of Minnesota. Beginning in 1916, just one year after he started at the U, Roberts also added the title of…
In Box 8 of the Bell Museum of Natural History collection resides a field notebook titled, “Trip to Western part of State, 1924.” In this notebook, Thomas Sadler Roberts recorded bird notes on his two-week trip to Grant, Big Stone,…
What they did before Google… Question C.D. Velie to Thomas Sadler Roberts, December 8, 1921: My Dear Doctor: I have two carrier pigeons, mounted, on my desk here at the office, which you can have if you will send over…
Are you sick of glass plate negatives yet? I certainly do post a lot about them. The fact is I spend the better part of my day looking at the scanned images of the negatives, deciphering the hand-written notations on…