DUNA

Digitally Unlocking Nature’s Archive (DUNA)

The Natural History Museum's Library and Archives is the national resource for natural historians, researchers, artists and academics. It has been developing its unparalleled collection of natural history literature, artwork and information resources since the Museum opened in 1881.

A rich reservoir of scientific, historical and social research data is locked in the handwritten documents, illustrations and artwork collections. Through the projects made available via DUNA we want to harness the power of the crowd to unleash this data via tools such as transcription and tagging and make it digitally discoverable, accessible and open to all for the first time. Please see the RESULTS tab for more details.

Please note that some collections in DUNA, which have not been transcribed before, may include content and language that is upsetting or offensive. This can include language that is racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. Although the content may reflect the attitudes of the historical period in which they were written, it is acknowledged that such discriminatory language and views are unacceptable today.
Should you encounter such material and you don’t wish to transcribe it, refresh the browser to generate a new page

About the collections

Daniel Solander: slip catalogue index
Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander (1733-1782) was a student of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) at Uppsala University in Sweden. Known as the father of taxonomy, Linnaeus introduced a system of naming plants and animals that is still in use today. After mastering Linnaeus’s system of binomial nomenclature, Solander moved to England in 1759 and a few years later was employed by the British Museum to catalogue the natural history collections (the Natural History Museum’s collections originally formed part of the British Museum in Bloomsbury, until a dedicated building opened in 1881). He is perhaps best known for accompanying his great friend Joseph Banks (1743-1820) on Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage aboard HMS Endeavour.

During the voyage, which sailed between 1768 and 1771, Solander made entries for his ‘Manuscript Slip Catalogue’ which would eventually comprise hundreds of slips of paper containing the species names and descriptions of plants that were collected. Systematically arranged in the Linnean system, these slips remain a valuable resource to researchers and botanists. Some years later an index was produced as a means of navigating both the catalogue and Willdenow’s edition of Linneas’ Species Plantarum. By transcribing this manuscript index, which forms part of a larger collection of unique and original material from the Endeavour voyage, we will be able to greatly improve access to the index itself, but also to Solander’s original manuscript slip catalogue.

William Kerr: manuscript journal
William Kerr (d.1814) was a gardener at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. In 1803 he was sent to China on the instruction of Joseph Banks to collect plants and send them back to Kew; eventually sending back over 200 examples of plants new to European gardens. From China, Kerr also went on to visit Java and the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

This journal describes Kerr’s travels and plant collecting in Luzon. It is mainly in English but contains several pages in Spanish.

Frank Collier: field notebook
Frank Simon Collier (1900-1964) grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at Oxford University before travelling to Nigeria in 1923 to work as a Forest Officer and later Chief Conservator. He had a particular interest in animals and birds and kept a series of notebooks recording the wildlife he came across with descriptions and sketches.

This notebook is from 1920-1922 and primarily covers wildlife around Northampton, Oxford and Cumberland. Please note that this collection in DUNA, which has not been transcribed before, may include content and language that depicts violence and/or cruelty against wild animals. Should you encounter such material and you don’t wish to transcribe it, refresh the browser to generate a new page.

Previous collections

Thank you to everyone who contributed to these completed workflows. We are starting to upload the processed transcriptions from this project to our discovery layer.
You can now view the typeset transcriptions alongside the handwritten originals.

Something fishy: the original drawings and manuscript descriptions of South-Sea Fishes by Andrew Garrett (1823-1887)
The manuscript pages in this collection accompany 489 original watercolour drawings of fishes found in the South Seas completed by the self-taught American naturalist Andrew Garrett. A skilled artist and ardent shell collector, Garrett, who first went to sea as a sailor at just 16 years of age, travelled extensively and in particular around Eastern Polynesia. In 1870 he eventually settled on the island of Huahine, French Polynesia, where he worked on his fish drawings and their accompanying descriptions.

Andrew Garrett's Fische der Südsee was published between 1873-1875 and edited by Albert Günther, Assistant Keeper of Zoology (later Keeper of Zoology) at the Natural History Museum. While the published text is in German, the original manuscripts are mostly in English, making them a valuable original source to be transcribed and made more widely available.

A Mineralogical Marvel: original drawings of minerals by Francois Louis Desfountaines Swebach (fl.1769)
This workflow invites volunteers to assist with the transcription of the French manuscript text that accompanies over 200 original watercolour drawings of mineral specimens by the self-taught artist, sculptor, engraver, painter and mineralogist Francois Louis Desfountaines Swebach.

Very little is known about Swebach, who worked with Parisian mineralogist Jean Baptiste Rome de l’Isle on Jean Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s illustrated publication on the mineral kingdom entitled Histoire Naturelle Règne Minéral. After developing an interest in minerals from the engraving work he carried out, Swebach started work on his own prospectus of paintings of mineral specimens. The project however never came to fruition as his handwritten note reads “The revolution prevented the publication of this work”. The transcription of the text accompanying these unique depictions of mineral specimens will further enable the enhanced discovery of Swebach’s incredible artistic legacy.

Lists, lists, lists! Original manuscript catalogues and inventories of the natural world
The extensive holdings of NHM Library and Archives include a considerable number of original manuscript lists, catalogues and inventories, each one containing valuable context and information about the collection of specimens and other objects from all over the world, many of which are now preserved in the Museum’s collections. Transcribing these important finding aids will allow their contents to be digitally searchable, and assist in allowing enhanced access to researchers and other institutions.

The first two lists to feature in this workflow are a catalogue of a collection of plants presented to Joseph Banks by Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-1798) and Georg Forster (1754-1794), and a catalogue of engraved copper plates created by Robert Brown (1773-1858).

Johann Reinhold Forster, and his son Georg, travelled as naturalists on James Cook’s second voyage between 1772 and 1775. This catalogue lists a collection of plant specimens gifted to Joseph Banks (1743-1820), a prominent botanist who took part in Cook’s first voyage and later held the position of President of the Royal Society for over 40 years. Botanist Robert Brown was employed by Banks in his herbarium and library. He had travelled as a naturalist himself, accompanying Matthew Flinders on the HMS Investigator in 1801.

Beautiful Botany: original botanical artworks and manuscript descriptions by Elizabeth Twining (1805-1889)
Elizabeth Twining was the daughter of the tea merchant Richard Twining II (1772-1857). Educated at home by her mother, she also enjoyed art lessons and travelled widely, both abroad and around England. Painting the local landscapes and their floras which she observed along the way, she soon became both a competent botanist and talented portraitist of plants and flowers.

This volume of her original watercolours and botanical notes formed the basis of an ambitious two volume folio publication titled the Natural Orders of Plants (1849-55) which she both illustrated and lithographed.

Margaret Fountaine: Lepidoptera sketchbooks
Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940) was an explorer who became one of the most extensively travelled British lepidopterists of her time. Her independent wealth enabled her to travel to the Middle East, India, China and Tibet, Hong Kong, Australia, North and South America, across Africa and into the Caribbean, in the process collecting over 22,000 butterflies and moths.

From the age of 16 she kept diaries which cover more than 60 years of her life which are now preserved in the Castle Museum in Norwich. The diaries formed the basis of her biography: ‘Love among the butterflies: the travels and adventures of a Victorian Lady’ (1980).

An accomplished illustrator, she also created these four exquisite sketchbooks which contain 862 watercolour drawings of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) larvae and pupae with their food plants, including many species previously unknown to Western science. The accompanying notes for the sketchbooks, which were created between 1907 and 1939, also provide important metadata as to the locations and altitudes of where the insects were found.

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How to transcribe

Contributors to DUNA will be transcribing handwritten archives and manuscripts from our collections, and at the same time tagging certain features in the text.

Don’t worry if you make a mistake in your transcription or tagging, as each page will be transcribed multiple times by different volunteers. You may find the handwriting difficult to read at first, but this will get easier with practice.

The exact sequence of tasks will be slightly different for each workflow, depending on the format and content, but full instructions on transcription and tagging, along with hints, tips and examples, can always be found in the Field Guide. Just click the tab on right hand side of the page to access the Field Guide at any time.

Handwritten text
In general, always type what you see, following the natural reading order of the text. Start a new line when the original text starts a new line. Leave a blank line (i.e. press enter twice) between paragraphs.

Don’t correct spellings, expand abbreviations or replace symbols with words*. If a word is split across two lines, type it as it is written.

*There are some exceptions to this, particularly where symbols can't be easily transcribed. Be sure to check the Field Guide section on Symbols if you come across anything new.

Tagging
If you cannot read a word, try comparing the shapes of each letter to other, clearer words on the page.

If anything is still unclear, take your best guess. Then highlight it and select the unclear tag below the transcription box. This will add opening and closing tags around the uncertain word and give us more information about the transcription. It is important that any uncertainty is indicated in this way so that the final transcriptions are as accurate as possible.

Deletions and insertions can also be tagged using the buttons below the transcription box. Highlight the relevant text and select the appropriate tag.
If something is completely illegible, either because the page is damaged, the writing is difficult to decipher, or the word has been crossed out beyond recognition, use the unclear tag without writing or highlighting any text.

If the illegible text has been crossed out, you can also use the deletion tag.

There are also other features that we would like to record, but for which we do not yet have tag buttons set up.

In these cases you can either copy and paste the tags from the task description or type them out yourself, around the relevant word or phrase. Tags are written using square brackets [ ] and consist of opening and closing pairs.

The opening tag comes before the relevant text and contains the single-word name of the tag, e.g [heading]

The closing tag comes after the relevant text. It contains the same name as the opening tag, but starts with a forward slash, e.g [/heading]

The additional features we will be tagging in this project are:

• Headings: [heading]text here[/heading]

• Underlined text: [underline]text here[/underline]

• Drawings or images: [drawing][/drawing]

Happy Transcribing!

Don’t forget that you can always refer to the Field Guide for full instructions, hints, tips and examples.