From personal to public: field books, museums, and the opening of the archives

Abstract

Large museums contain diverse collections, often including specimens, artefacts, archives, and publications. At the intersection of many of these are natural history field books, which are regularly treated as both museum objects and archival items, as scientific data and historical narratives, and as personal artefacts, organizational records and tools for public engagement. Field books contain key contextual information about collection items and are evidence for significant data in collection management systems, while also containing social and cultural observations, historical weather observations, jokes and recipes. In recent years, a number of museums have established projects intended to document, digitize, and transcribe their collections of field books, seeking to make these important research records available to the public online. This article examines the nature of field books, highlighting the ways in which they function as boundary objects between professions and disciplines. A summary of key field book projects is used to explore how institutions seek to pluralize these records, followed by an examination of the value of these records to science, history, museology and other disciplines. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these projects for museums, archivists, and archival collections more broadly.