Datasetpublic

biglam/index-cards-harvard-botany-metropolitan-flora

Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks (Harvard Botany Libraries, 1894–1895) 4,574 botanical specimen index cards from the Harvard University Botany Libraries' Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks, 1894–1895 (bulk), compiled by Walter Deane (1848–1930). Records flora of the Metropolitan Park system around Boston — Middlesex Fells Reservation, Blue Hills, Norfolk County, and adjacent areas — with one card per specimen entry: species, locality, collection… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/biglam/index-cards-harvard-botany-metropolitan-flora.

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Dataset Card

Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks (Harvard Botany Libraries, 1894–1895)

4,574 botanical specimen index cards from the Harvard University Botany Libraries' Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks, 1894–1895 (bulk), compiled by Walter Deane (1848–1930). Records flora of the Metropolitan Park system around Boston — Middlesex Fells Reservation, Blue Hills, Norfolk County, and adjacent areas — with one card per specimen entry: species, locality, collection date, collector, habitat notes.

Harvested from the 7 IA items `mhg795390874cardfile{1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 2a, 2b, 3}`.

Each row pairs the full-resolution card scan with the Internet Archive's ABBYY OCR text and full provenance back to the source IA item.

Source & licence

—Source: Harvard University Botany Libraries — Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks, 1894–1895 (compiled by Walter Deane). Source IA items: `mhg795390874cardfile1a` through cardfile3.
—Licence: Public Domain. Harvard's own IA item metadata declares possible-copyright-status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT. The cards are 1894–1895 records; the compiler Walter Deane died in 1930. Please retain the attribution to Harvard University Botany Libraries on reuse.

Schema

column	type	description
`image`	image	the card scan (JPEG, re-encoded from the IA JP2 derivative)
`ocr_text`	string	full-item OCR text from the IA ABBYY/DjVu output
`page`	int	page index within the source item
`source_id`	string	IA item identifier
`source_title`	string	IA item title
`source_collection`	string	IA collection (`harvardbotanylibraries`)
`source_url`	string	`https://archive.org/details/<source_id>`
`license`	string	`undetermined` (legacy field — the actual status is NOTINCOPYRIGHT per Harvard)
`theme`	string	`natural_history_specimen`

Note: rows carry license: undetermined from the harvest pipeline, which only reads the IA licenseurl field. Harvard's possible-copyright-status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT lives in a separate metadata field and is the operative rights statement.

How this was built

Part of an exploration of public archival index-card collections for GLAM/AI work. The reusable harvester (resumable per-item parquet shards, polite IA access, JP2 → JPEG decode via Pillow) runs on Hugging Face Jobs against a curated list of IA items.

Productive IA discovery query (generic full-text is too noisy):

title:"index cards" AND mediatype:texts

Citation

Deane, Walter (compiler). Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks, 1894–1895 (bulk). Harvard University Botany Libraries. Available via the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/mhg795390874cardfile1a>.

Sibling datasets

`biglam/index-cards-cas-galapagos-stewart-specimens` — Alban Stewart's 1905–06 Galápagos expedition specimen card file (CAS Archives).

Browse the wider catalogue: BigLAM "Index card datasets" collection.