Hi everyone!! So, like Karl, I was recently asked to write a post on another blog (The Smithsonian Field book Project blog!) and thought, instead of rewriting the whole post and publishing it here, I could just point our lovely readers in the right direction!

The post on the Smithsonian Field book Project blog details the specific interactions I’ve had at the American Museum of Natural History with field books. The majority of my experience with field books was actually initiated by the curators and scientific staff that I interviewed–they will often talk about how invaluable their field notes and lab notes are to maintaining the long-term viability and usability of their research data, or how older field books are incredibly impactful to their ongoing projects. For those that don’t know, field books are essentially notebooks that scientists bring into the field to record their observations and findings. There are a few tidbits in my post about how field books are necessary as primary source documentation for ongoing and current scientific research. Basically–there are really cool old field books at the Museum and they are still relevant to science!

Without further ado: here’s the post!

Also, if anyone missed it, I recently did a screencast on NDSR and NDSR-NY. This is basically a “what is this” and “why should you do this” type of screencast–so if you are interested in being a Resident in next year’s iteration, I would recommend giving it a watch! You can find that here!