Description
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
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 1,853 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
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
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Biodiversity Heritage Library. 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.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: f4ce02e4-4b4e-461b-97d5-1ac93b09310b. Biodiversity Heritage Library publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Keywords
Occurrence; Observation
Contacts
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- Point Of Contact
https://orcid.org/https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4783-382X
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Geographic Coverage
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.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
Occurrence data documenting the birds of New England, USA.
| Kingdom | Animalia, Plantae |
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| Class | Aves |
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 1886-01-01 / 1894-12-31 |
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Project Data
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.
| Title | William Brewster Papers |
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| Identifier | https://volunteer.ala.org.au/institution/index/11740375 |
| Funding | 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. |
The personnel involved in the project:
Collection Data
| Collection Name | William Brewster Papers |
|---|---|
| Collection Identifier | https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers |
| Collection Name | William Brewster: An Ornithologist's Legacy |
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| Collection Identifier | https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy |
Bibliographic Citations
- William Brewster Papers. (n.d.). Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers 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 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://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112436
Additional Metadata
BHL Data Disclaimer: https://about.biodiversitylibrary.org/tools-and-services/data-disclaimer/
| Purpose | 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. |
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| Maintenance Description | Update frequency: Irregular; a dataset update of cataloged page images is planned in the future. |
| Alternative Identifiers | https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/ipt/resource?r=william_brewster_fieldnotes |