Abstract
The staff of Wolbach Library, in collaboration with partners at both the Smith-sonian Institution and Harvard University, has begun a complex digitization and transcriptioneffort aimed at making a large collection of historical astronomy research more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). This collection of material was originally produced from the mid-18th century through the early 20th century by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory and was recently re-discovered in the HCO Plate Stacks holdings. The team of professionals supporting the effort to make this century and a half old science FAIR have developed a novel, distributed workflow to ensure that people can engage critically with this material to the fullest extent possible. The project’s workflow is guided by the collections as data imperative conceptual frameworks and is now being referred to as Project PHaEDRA, or Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy.
Highlights
A prodigious collection of historical astronomy research produced from the mid-18th century through the early 20th century by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) was recently rediscovered after decades of being overlooked in an off-site storage facility owned by Harvard University, the Harvard Depository
The staff of Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), recognizing the need to share this collection with the broadest possible community, built a multiskilled team and comprehensive workflow to ensure that the necessary infrastructure was in place to digitize the collection and enrich its metadata to the fullest extent possible using transcription
The Project PHaEDRA team aims to achieve its goals of ensuring that the PHaEDRA collection is as broadly useful as possible by working toward meeting the standards outlined in the FAIR Data Principles
Summary
A prodigious collection of historical astronomy research produced from the mid-18th century through the early 20th century by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) was recently rediscovered after decades of being overlooked in an off-site storage facility owned by Harvard University, the Harvard Depository. The staff of Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), recognizing the need to share this collection with the broadest possible community, built a multiskilled team and comprehensive workflow to ensure that the necessary infrastructure was in place to digitize the collection and enrich its metadata to the fullest extent possible using transcription. Throughout the process of defining the workflow, Wolbach was guided by the collections as data imperative conceptual frameworks and worked to meet goals originally developed to support modern open data practices: The FAIR Data Principles (Table 1)
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