The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University is the oldest natural history museum in the Americas and one of the country’s leading scientific institutions, with over 200 years of experience in curation, cutting-edge research and education.

The Academy has more than 19 million specimens, all carefully documented and well-preserved for future generations. They serve as the foundation for an active research program that continues to focus on the critical environmental issues of our time, ranging from evolution and biodiversity to human health and climate change.

Learn more on the Academy's website.

About the Academy's Library and Archives

The Academy Library and Archives is internationally recognized for its collections documenting the historical development of the natural and environmental sciences. The Library holdings span five centuries (sixteenth century to the present) and include a wide array of books and periodicals. The Archives collections span four centuries (late seventeenth century to the present). They include manuscripts, field notebooks, correspondence, films, journals, photographs, art, and artifacts. The Library and Archives continues to evolve, serving multiple disciplines and constituents while fostering innovative museum programming and exhibitions, cross-disciplinary research, and creative work at the intersection between the visual arts and the natural sciences.

For more information, visit our website.

About the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.

Project Background

The Academy partners with BHL and other natural history organizations around the world to provide free, open access to biodiversity literature. This is achieved through digitization projects that publish images of books, documents, journals, illustrations, and other materials onto BHL's online platform. BHL further enhances access to these materials using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which reads static images and extracts machine-readable text that can be highlighted, copied, and searched on a computer. Unfortunately, OCR currently does not work when presented with handwritten documents, which impedes researchers from easily searching through materials like field journals.

This project uses Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) software to create computer-generated transcriptions of digitized field journals from the Academy's archives. HTR technology is not perfectly accurate and requires people to correct the transcriptions before they can be displayed to the public as reputable resources. This is where volunteers can help! We need volunteers to review computer-generated transcriptions of our field journals so the corrected transcriptions can be uploaded to BHL, further enhancing global access to archival materials.

About Amazon Textract

The Academy uses Amazon Textract to create computer-generated transcriptions of its field journals. Amazon Textract is a machine learning (ML) service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, layout elements, and data from scanned documents. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract specific data from documents. Please note that data from this project might be used to train AI models in the future.

Through a partnership with Amazon Web Services, the Academy set up a private account to run Amazon Textract by uploading images into an S3 bucket. Images and data shared within this account are not used by Amazon to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and only Academy staff have access to the account.

Harmful Content Statement

This project contains digital copies of historical field journals held by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Library and Archives. As a natural history museum dedicated to understanding the natural world and inspiring everyone to care for it, the Academy collects and preserves these field journals as part of the historic record. The field journals document the past and were created within the context of their original time-period. As such, they contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view and may reflect inaccurate, outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. This includes language and imagery that may be racist, sexist, ableist, classist, colonialist and xenophobic in attitude or demeans the humanity of people. By providing access to these historical materials, the Academy does not endorse any attitudes, prejudices, or behaviors depicted therein. In the interests of historical integrity, the Academy makes these field journals available online to preserve historical context and maintain transparency about historical viewpoints for educational purposes. If you encounter content that you find offensive or harmful and would like to provide feedback, please email library@ansp.org