̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - JISC

̽��ֱ��longitude problem: 300-year-old archive opened to the world

sjr81 — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:12:37 +0000

Now, for the first time, the full story of attempts to solve the longitude problem - unravelling the lone genius myth popularised in film and literature - will be made freely available to everyone via Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Digital Library.

Launched today, the complete archive of the Board of Longitude, held by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, and associated National Maritime Museum collections, will take their place alongside the works of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton at cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk.

Treasures of the Longitude archive, available to view in high-resolution for the first time, include accounts of bitter rivalries, wild proposals and first encounters between Europeans and Pacific peoples. This includes logbooks of Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery, the naming of Australia and even a letter from Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty, who writes to apologise for the loss of a timekeeper after his ship was ‘pirated from my command’.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Digital Library project was launched in June 2010 following a £1.5m gift from the Polonsky Foundation. ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “With the digitisation of this incredible collection, we have taken another important step towards realising our shared ambition of creating a digital library for the world.”

̽��ֱ��Board of Longitude collection is the largest project undertaken to date by the Cambridge Digital Library team, comprising more than 65,000 images. Funded by Jisc (http://www.jisc.ac.uk), a charity which provides digital services for UK education and research, the collection has been developed in partnership with a wider five-year research project by Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum.

In July 1714 an act of parliament established a £20,000 prize, worth about £1.5 million today, for the discovery of longitude at sea: determining a ship’s position east and west from a fixed meridian line.

Cambridge historian Professor Simon Schaffer said: “ ̽��ֱ��problem of longitude could be a lethal one. ̽��ֱ��act of parliament established the Board of Longitude – think the X Factor, only much more money and much more important – that would reward anyone who could solve the problem of longitude.

“ ̽��ֱ��longitude story is a spectacular example of expert disagreement and public participation. As well as attracting the greatest scientific minds of the day, the board enticed people who belong to one of the most important traditions in British society; the extreme eccentric.”

̽��ֱ��hugely significant archive preserves detailed minutes from the first recorded meeting in 1737 right through to the Board of Longitude’s dissolution in 1828.

Royal Museums Greenwich’s Dr Richard Dunn, who is currently curating a major exhibition inspired by longitude, said the archive proves that John Harrison, while a towering figure in the story, is not the start and end point for all things longitude.

" ̽��ֱ��archive places the familiar story of Harrison in its richer context. He was a crucial figure but the story is much broader. It takes in the development of astronomy, exploration and technological innovation and creativity during the period of the Industrial Revolution, the work of the first government body devoted to scientific matters, and public reactions to a challenge many considered hopeless.”

As the schemes for longitude needed to be tested on long voyages, the archive includes much detail on Britain’s maritime interests, explorations and encounters with other cultures. It also played a major role in plans for voyages by James Cook and successors into the Pacific in the 1770s - and into the Arctic in the opening decades of the 19th century. ̽��ֱ��archive includes four eyewitness accounts of Cook’s Second Voyage and contains the first Western maps and descriptions of many Pacific places and peoples.

̽��ֱ��Board’s work continued long after longitude was effectively solved and its many interests and long duration makes the archive a hugely important primary source on the development of science and technology in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It also provides valuable insight into the social history of the era with thousands of names featuring in its files; from Isaac Newton, to eccentric inventors who berated the Board for not following up on their ideas.

Indeed, the archive contains two volumes of ‘impractical’ schemes submitted in the hope of finding a reward. They were later bound and prefaced with title pages such as ‘wild proposals resulting from dreams’. They came via a diverse cross-section of society, from prisoners seeking release in return for their ‘solutions’ to citizens like Mr William Lester, who proposed solar experiments to find longitude that involved igniting points on a globe with a lens. ̽��ֱ��board underlined his statement that if the globe is correct and properly adjusted ‘you will set fire to London’.

Flickr Gallery of images from the Cambridge and Greenwich archives can be seen here

Inset image: Sextant, made by Jesse Ramsden. Copyright National Maritime Museum

It was the conundrum that baffled some of the greatest and most eccentric experts of the 18th century - and captivated the British public during an era of unprecedented scientific and technical transformation.

̽��ֱ��problem of longitude could be a lethal one.

Simon Schaffer

Introduction to the Board of Longitude

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Managing the data deluge

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:32:28 +0000

̽��ֱ��volume of digital data created during the lifetime of a research project is expanding rapidly. Scholars across all disciplines are increasingly able to access, share, transform and connect large and diverse sets of data. However, this ‘data deluge’ introduces new challenges, as the volume becomes difficult to manage, hardware and software become obsolete, and the original contexts of data are lost.

̽��ֱ��‘Incremental’ project, funded by JISC, is a collaboration between Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and the ̽��ֱ�� of Glasgow, and aims to improve and increase research curation within UK higher education institutions. Both the Digital Curation Centre and Digital Preservation Coalition are providing support and guidance.

A scoping study conducted earlier this year identified the attitudes, experiences and needs of a range of researchers at both universities. Now the project is taking simple and pragmatic steps to meet these needs, including the creation of jargon-free web resources offering guidance on planning, organising, accessing and storing data in the long term.

‘Managing data well ensures research integrity and replication, provides opportunities for researchers to discover and share information, and increases the longevity of research,’ says Grant Young, the Library’s digital preservation specialist. ‘Incremental aims to provide researchers with the services and resources they need to ensure that their digital data can have a lasting impact.’

For more information, please contact Catharine Ward, Incremental Project Manager (cw330@cam.ac.uk) or visit www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/

A project at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is developing services and resources to help academics manage their digital data.

Managing data well ensures research integrity and replication, provides opportunities for researchers to discover and share information, and increases the longevity of research.

Grant Young

Looking Glass from flickr

Deluge

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Freeze Frame: through the eyes of the polar explorers

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) holds a unique photographic collection that documents over a century of journeys to the Arctic and Antarctica – two of the last great wildernesses on Earth. ̽��ֱ��archive is among the richest in the world for the study of polar environments but is extremely fragile, and for the past two years a team at SPRI have been working to capture and preserve over 20,000 of their photographic negatives. Now nearing completion, the JISC-funded project will be available online as Freeze Frame, opening up this unparalleled resource to those wishing to discover the history of polar exploration for themselves.

̽��ֱ��heroic age

Spanning 1845–1982, the images represent the great wealth of history of exploration and embrace some of the most iconic photographs of their time: the men, their ships, sledges and skidoos; tents, huts and rations; equipment for survival and for scientific investigation; as well as stunning images of the Arctic and Antarctic landscapes. ̽��ֱ��collection includes photographer Herbert Ponting’s entire visual archive (some 1700 glass plates) taken on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Expedition (1910–1913) to reach the South Pole. Also featured are images from Ernest Shackleton’s valiant attempt in 1915 to achieve the first land-crossing of the Antarctic, and the only known daguerreotypes of Sir John Franklin and his crew, taken in 1845 prior to their fateful voyage in search of the Northwest Passage.

Promoting research

̽��ֱ��collection provides a record of the living conditions and the scientific efforts of the men involved in polar exploration. This is an invaluable resource to researchers who are interested in exploring the history of extreme physiology and human endurance, such as Dr Vanessa Heggie from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Dr Heggie will be using the Freeze Frame materials as she starts work on a project examining the experiments and observations that were undertaken on various trips to the poles, since these were central to some of the earliest understandings of how the human body reacts to low temperatures. This type of research has diverse applications, from improving the provision of emergency medical aid during natural disasters to designing medical supervision for ultra-endurance sports.

Freeze Frame

Growing public interest in changes to the polar ice caps, as well as the forthcoming centenaries of the ‘Heroic Age’ expeditions, have provided the impetus for SPRI to promote research into its collections. In so doing, this visual archive will be accessible to a global audience, from schoolchildren in Nunavut and northern Greenland investigating their polar heritage, to university researchers with an interest in the development of polar technologies, physiology at low temperatures or the changing shape of the cryosphere.

Digitisation of related documents – personal journals and official expedition reports – will provide historical and cultural context. Many of the images are unpublished, having been rediscovered within private albums and personal collections. A series of interpretative web pages and e-learning resources will provide access to these hidden collections for all educational levels. ̽��ֱ��hope is that Freeze Frame will encourage users to discover polar environments through the eyes of those who dared to venture there.

For further information, please contact the author Heather Lane (freezeframe@spri.cam.ac.uk), Librarian and Keeper of Collections, Scott Polar Research Institute. Freeze Frame was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and will be launched on 1 March 2009.

An ambitious project is making accessible some of the most important visual resources for research into international polar exploration.

SPRI

freezeframe

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