Hannah Norton Blog 1: The American Philosophical Society Lewis and Clark Collection

The American Philosophical Society (APS) is what I would consider a generalist intellectual society founded in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. It calls itself “this country's first learned society” and promotes scholarly research in the sciences and humanities. Among various other artifacts and documents on science, American history, and philosophy, the APS houses original journals from the Lewis and Clark Expedition. These journals, kept by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, offer descriptions of newly rediscovered plant and animal species, ethnographic studies of the Native American tribes on which they relied for guidance and supplies, and maps of the regions they explored. The digital collection consists of portions of the journals and some other materials relating to the expedition.


Collection Principles
The original collection, of which only part is digitized, is thoroughly described in the APS’s manuscript catalog entry on the Lewis and Clark Journals. This description includes background information explaining the historical context, a statement of the scope and content of the papers, restrictions on use, provenance, other formats available, preferred citation, and related materials available in APS collections. Fewer than half of the separately identified images and texts listed as being part of the original collection, however, have been digitized and incorporated into the digital collection. No explanation is available as to why some items were chosen for digitization and others were passed over.

Object Characteristics
Objects primarily consist of handwritten passages of text and drawn images from the natural world. The form of digitization produces some objects that are easily usable and some that are not. Images are zoomable, but in many cases, including some maps and large documents, the highest magnification still yields illegible text. Some text excerpts, on the other hand, are readable at the available magnification and include a complete entry on a particular topic. Other one-page text excerpts are frustrating because they contain only part of the content of a particular entry. In balance, then, these are not good objects because they don’t support the basic intended function - reading the objects' contents.

Metadata
One of the strengths of the collection is the metadata available for each document. Once a document is selected to view, the following metadata is presented beneath the image: unique identifier, title, creator, description, notes, subject, date, format of original, source, source call number, relation (the web address where it can be found), and rights. The collection is searchable by each of these fields and any combination of the fields.

Intended Audience
It seems that the intended audience is members of the general public with an interest in this period in American history. While it is a natural assumption that the APS’s membership is also an intended audience, members are exemplary scholars in the various fields that the APS’s collections and research cover. The images provided in this digital collection are not of high enough quality to sustain any great amount of scholarly research.

Overall this collection was a disappointment to me. The American Philosophical Society has so much cool stuff about history and the history of science in the United States, and the Lewis and Clark papers are no exception. Unfortunately, the excerpted nature of the digital collection and the inadequate size of many documents makes it very difficult to make use of these treasures.