https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/ipt/resource?r=william_brewster_fieldnotes
Species Occurrence Data from the Journals of William Brewster, 1886-1894
William
Brewster
Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology
Curator of Mammals and Birds
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge
Massachusetts
US
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2119625
JJ
Dearborn
Smithsonian Institution
Data Manager, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Washington
District of Columbia
US
dearbornjj@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4783-382X
Joseph
deVeer
Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library
Project Manager and Museum Liason
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge
Massachusetts
02138
US
jdeveer@oeb.harvard.edu
https://library.mcz.harvard.edu/
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0872-0718
Mike
Lichtenberg
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Lead Developer and Solutions Architect
Washington
District of Columbia
US
lichtenbergM@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0220-5275
Joel
Richard
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Head of Web Services and IT
Washington
DC
US
richardj@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4589-2351
JJ
Dearborn
Smithsonian Institution
Data Manager, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Washington
District of Columbia
US
dearbornjj@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4783-382X
Joseph
deVeer
Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library
Project Manager and Museum Liason
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge
Massachusetts
02138
US
jdeveer@oeb.harvard.edu
https://library.mcz.harvard.edu/
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0872-0718
2023-09-27
eng
Collection Summary: Journals in which Brewster recorded observations of birds, their habitats and seasonal behavior, while traveling through New England and other areas of the United States.
Collector History Note: William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, and the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He amassed a collection of over forty thousand specimens of birds, nests, and eggs, one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Brewster curated the bird collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) from 1885 until his death in 1919 at which time his personal collection was gifted to the Museum.
Brewster conducted ornithological expeditions to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Colorado, West Virginia and North Carolina mountains, South Carolina and Georgia lowlands, Florida and to Trinidad. He served as Curator of mammals and birds, Boston Society of Natural History, from 1880 to 1887; Curator of mammals and birds, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, from 1885 to 1900. For additional biographical information see: Bird-Lore (1919) 21, pp. 277-286.
Collector ID: https://bionomia.net/Q2119625
Citations:
deVeer, J. (n.d.). William Brewster - Collection overview. Harvard CURIOSity Digital Collections. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy
William Brewster Papers. (n.d.). Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers
Occurrence
GBIF Dataset Type Vocabulary: http://rs.gbif.org/vocabulary/gbif/dataset_type_2015-07-10.xml
Observation
GBIF Dataset Subtype Vocabulary: http://rs.gbif.org/vocabulary/gbif/dataset_subtype.xml
BHL Data Disclaimer: https://about.biodiversitylibrary.org/tools-and-services/data-disclaimer/
To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
Brewster recorded a lifetime of observations on wildlife and plants, changing landscapes, and daily weather, making his notes a valuable resource for modern scientists studying ecological change. His observations are primarily based in New England, USA, where he split his time between two homes in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts. Brewster would stay in a cabin by the Concord River to study nature and escape city life in Cambridge. He also took notes when travelling: his notebooks document trips to the southern USA, the Caribbean, and Europe.
-180
180
90
-90
1886-01-01
1894-12-31
Occurrence data documenting the birds of New England, USA.
kingdom
Animalia
kingdom
Plantae
class
Aves
As the urgency to address the climate crisis intensifies, the availability of accurate and comprehensive biodiversity data has become crucial for informing climate change studies, tracking key environmental indicators, and building global biodiversity monitoring platforms. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) plays a vital role in the core biodiversity infrastructure, housing over 60 million pages of digitized literature about life on Earth. Recognizing the value of over 500 years of data in BHL, a global network of BHL staff is working to establish a scalable data pipeline to provide actionable occurrence data from BHL’s vast and diverse collections of primary source materials such as diaries, journals, correspondence, and photographs. See: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112436 for more information.
Update frequency: Irregular; a dataset update of cataloged page images is planned in the future.
irregular
JJ
Dearborn
Smithsonian Institution
Data Manager, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Washington
District of Columbia
US
dearbornjj@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4783-382X
Joseph
deVeer
Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library
Project Manager and Museum Liason
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge
Massachusetts
02138
US
jdeveer@oeb.harvard.edu
https://library.mcz.harvard.edu/
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0872-0718
Mike
Lichtenberg
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Lead Developer and Solutions Architect
Washington
District of Columbia
US
lichtenbergM@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0220-5275
Joel
Richard
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Head of Web Services and IT
Washington
DC
US
richardj@si.edu
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4589-2351
William Brewster Papers
Joseph
deVeer
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0872-0718
The Ernst Mayr Library has digitized more than 56,000 pages of the journals and diaries of William Brewster, a prolific ornithologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Brewsters journals are mostly handwritten volumes that are not suitable for Optical Character Recognition software. To extract occurence data from these journals, they need to be transcribed. Volumes are available for transcription on the DigiVol platform.
The BHL Field Notes Project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), has provided open access to field notes held by multiple institutions. Project funding provided the means to digitize primary natural history field research material field notes, including diaries, journals, correspondence, and photographs. The collection contains 2,851 volumes from 1,653 titles, containing 221,394 pages.
2023-09-24T05:53:27.845-04:00
dataset
Brewster W, Dearborn J, deVeer J, Lichtenberg M, Richard J (2023). Species Occurrence Data from the Journals of William Brewster, 1886-1894. Version 1.2. Biodiversity Heritage Library. Occurrence dataset. https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/ipt/resource?r=william_brewster_fieldnotes&v=1.2
William Brewster Papers. (n.d.). Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers
deVeer, J. (n.d.). William Brewster - Collection overview. Harvard CURIOSity Digital Collections. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy
Dearborn, J., Lichtenberg, M., Richard, J. M., deVeer, J., Trizna, M., & Mika, K. (2023). Unearthing the Past for a Sustainable Future: Extracting and transforming data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library for climate action. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 7.
https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/ipt/logo.do?r=william_brewster_fieldnotes
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers
William Brewster Papers
https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy
William Brewster: An Ornithologist's Legacy
https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/ipt/resource?id=william_brewster_fieldnotes/v1.2.xml