Thanks to the help of remote volunteers, we’ve just reached a milestone in our effort to digitize the collection of ornithologist William Brewster: Brewster’s mostly handwritten journals (1871-1916) are now fully transcribed! The Brewster collection, held in the Mayr Library’s Special Collections, includes his journals, diaries, other notebooks, photographs and correspondences, which at this point have been fully digitized. Adding these images and transcriptions to the ...

Against biography: Nabokov versus Field

Oct 22nd, 2018 by houghtonmodern

...

The weekend looked promising:  a lovely clear Friday night for a drive to Burlington, Vermont, USA from southern New Hampshire to attend the Northeast Natural History Conference (13-15 April 2018).  What could be better than a hotel humming with botanists and zoologists and activities for them?  The conference was packed—five concurrent sessions (often standing room only) and around 140 posters Saturday and Sunday along with workshops (Bat houses anyone?) and demonstrations throughout the weekend.  Students, faculty and naturalists from colleges, universities and...

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.

Most of Brewster’s observations are based in New England, where he split his time between...