Embracing the Crowd: People-powered Research to Preserve the History of Astronomy

Abstract

Project PHaEDRA (Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy) is a collaborative initiative led by Wolbach Library to digitize, transcribe, and enhance the metadata of over 2,500 notebooks and logbooks created from the mid-18th through early 20th centuries by the Harvard Computers and other researchers at the Harvard College Observatory. Digitization of the notebooks began in 2016, and was completed in 2019. As the notebooks were digitized, they were made available online through the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). At the same time, the digital scans were sent to the Smithsonian Transcription Center for full transcription by volunteers. While the full transcriptions will prove useful to researchers when completed, they do not provide a mechanism for linking the PHaEDRA notebooks back to their original source material: over 500,000 glass plate photographs identified by unique plate numbers. To remedy this, PHaEDRA team members are now working with volunteers on the Zooniverse platform to identify and transcribe the plate numbers found in the notebooks. This new component of Project PHaEDRA is called Star Notes and will eventually allow for deep linking between the notebooks and the digitized glass plates. As other observatories and astronomy libraries consider what to do with their glass plate collections and associated logbooks, Project PHaEDRA may be used as a model to make our shared astronomical heritage accessible for future generations.