David Null, DirectorUniversity Archives and Records Management ServicesUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

National Archives Preservation Conference, March 26, 2009

Considered by many as the father of wildlife management and of the United States’ wilderness system. Leopold was an educator, conservationist, forester, philosopher, writer, and outdoor enthusiast.

Author of A Sand County Almanac

Includes essay “The Land Ethic”

“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of land.”

Born in Burlington, Iowa , 1887

Attended Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, 1904/5

Attended Yale Forest School, receiving Master of Forestry, 1909

Joins U.S. Forest Service in 1909, assigned to Apache National Forest, Arizona Territory

Transfers to Carson National Forest, New Mexico Territory, in 1911. Instrumental in having Gila National Forest designated as first official wilderness area, 1924

Transfers to U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI in 1924

Accepts appointment to new chair of game management in the Department of Agricultural Economics, 1933

1939 becomes chair of new Department of Wildlife Management

Dies of a heart attack while fighting a grass fire on a neighbors farm, April 21, 1948

A Sand County Almanac published posthumously in 1949 by Oxford University Press

Donated to University Archives in 1960s

Some from Department of Wildlife Management, some from Leopold family

Collection consists of 27.6 cubic feet (83 archives boxes), 12 journals, 7 diaries, 1 scrapbook, 3 reels of microfilm, 5 folios, 3 cases, 1000 photos, and memorabilia.

Founded in 1982, by Leopold’s children: Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl, and Estella

Family’s literary rights assigned to the foundation

Who should apply: University Archives or Leopold Foundation?

Leopold Foundation was conducting a $7,750,000 fundraising campaign

Few private foundations seem to apply for these types of grants

Aldo Leopold Foundation applied for grant, in cooperation with the University Archives

Awarded two-year, $110,530 matching grant, Jan. 2007

The ALF hired the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center to do the digitization

UW-Madison General Library System/UWDCC agreed to donate $25,000 in scanning costs

UW Digital Collections Center in existence since 2001, currently funded by UW-Madison and UW-System

At the time of the application had digitized over 1,300,000 pages of text and over 40,000 images. Very good at estimating costs, timelines, etc.

So had very good infrastructure for the project

Already had an EAD guide to the collection, but needed revision

Hired a graduate student to go through the physical collection and also revise the EAD guide

No additional metadata was added

Online equivalent of paging through a folder or a journal

Digitized using UWDCC’s Electronic Facsimile Text (Pageturner/EFacs)

Images were done in JPEG 2000, so can zoom in closely

High resolution tiffs and metadata stored in 3 locations.

Graduate student went through all papers

Made sure materials were in order

Flattened, removed staples, etc.

Marked anything needing special attention

Took materials to digitization site

Brought materials back and reviewed them

Bill Meier, “On the Paper Trail with Aldo Leopold,” Leopold Outlook Winter 2008 http://www.aldoleopold.org/About/outlook/winter2008/paperTrail.shtml

Leopold wrote out, longhand, a first draft, and then he frequently attached to that draft small slips of paper that contained comments, criticisms, revisions, or references to maps and figures. Because of the poor state of much of the tape, staples, pins, paperclips, and other fasteners he used, each of these slips had to be removed (often they concealed the original writing beneath them). What followed was like putting together the pieces of a puzzle: we had to communicate with scanners how best to capture each stage of Leopold’s thought process in order to present to an online audience the evolution of his ideas from one version of an essay to the next.

Digitized journals/diaries first because of condition

heavily used, edges fraying, bindings loosening

many pages have small photos pasted in

lots of pencil maps, illustrations, etc.

Pine Cone

Game management bulletin published 1915-1931

4-page issues on newsprint, quite fragile

Conservation estimates from Wisconsin Historical

Society run from $650 - $5000 depending on treatment

Photographs: will be around 1000

Memorabilia:

http://digicoll-dev.library.wisc.edu/AldoLeopold/data/images/MmBib/LeopoldArchives/gallery_LeopoldArchives.html

Estimates from the UWDCC for digitization have been pretty accurate, actually somewhat lower than expected

Running about $ 1.40 per page (varies with type of material, e.g. journals vs. letter)

Includes actual scanning, plus document preparation, metadata, project management, quality control, etc. (total of 17 items)

Digitizing other Leopold materials:

Robert McCabe Collection

Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology

Collections from Leopold Foundation

Others

Most textual material is digitized, all live by April

Photos are the major remaining part

Leopold Foundation is working on their own web pages

Do more publicity and assessment

“I should add that the beauty of having this archive on-line was made abundantly clear when I looked into the Charles Elton papers at the Bodleian, with Julianne Warren. Nothing whatsoever is on-line, except a list of what they have, some of which looks potentially very important to her project and to mine (they are somewhat related). So one of us is going to have to go to Oxford to dredge this archive, and that's even harder than going to Madison. The contrasting experience with the 2 archives made me realize how digitizing archives will revolutionize research and make archives much more valuable.”