Curating Archive and Library Special Collections for Large-Scale Environmental Data Collection: A Case Study

This lightning talk will discuss preliminary findings from a case study conducted at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which sought to identify current practices for organizing, digitizing, and describing materials suited for the study of environmental history and to ascertain best practices that facilitate easy, large-scale retrieval of data from sources traditionally siloed for qualitative use. The case study specifically attempted to develop a long-term spatiotemporal record of rainfall in California prior to the implementation of rain gauge measurements using print, digitized, and born-digital collections. In addition to sharing findings on the curation practices that may support or impede the large-scale data collection of environmental observations, this lightening talk will discuss the ethical considerations of curating digital collections for large-scale data retrieval.