Mapping Cook's Endeavor

Fans of Captain Cook and his adventures and accomplishments might be interested to learn about the work of the Rhode Island Marine Archeaology Project (RIMAP), led by Dr. D. K. Abass.  RIMAP's mapping of  Revolutionary War-era British naval vessels in Newport harbor may have turned up Cook's Endeavour, the ship that took him on his very first voyage of exploration.

The route of Cook's first voyage, HMS Endeavour, 1768-1771

Cook's voyages are well documented.  Not only did he provide the Royal Navy with an account of his ventures, but several crewman on the three voyages also published their own accounts.  Sydney Parkinson, a Scots botanical illustrator, naturalist, and artist, was employed by Joseph Banks, a British naturalist and botanist, to accompany him on Cook's first voyage.  Banks and Swedish botanist Daniel Solander collected hundreds of plant and animal specimens and it was Parkinson's job to draw them in detail.  Parkinson also became fascinated with the people they encountered on the voyage and drew many of them as well, recording his experiences in a journal he kept during the voyage.  Sadly, Parkinson died of dysentery in 1771 while aboard ship.  Although Banks, as his employer, claimed all of his drawings and papers, including his journal, he lent it to Parkinson's brother, who published the journal with some of the drawings in 1773.  We're fortunate to have a copy in the Bell Library collection.

The image at right, depicting the distinctively tatooed face of a New Zealand chief, is one of several published in A journal of a voyage to the South Seas in His Majesty's ship the Endeavour, London, 1773 (Bell 1773 fPa).  Parkinson's images offered the European reading public their first glimpse of Pacific Islanders.

According to the caption on this image (left), sticking out one's tongue at an enemy is a gesture of defiance. 

Check out the Bell Library's online exhibit:  Captain Cook's Voyages of Discovery

Collaborating with Digital Vendors: Going over to the dark side?

I have been approached by several vendors of digital packages over the years who were interested in including materials from the James Ford Bell Library in new digital products.  These vendors scan and package a variety of digital materials, drawn largely from archives and special collections, and then sell the packages to schools and universities.  I resisted.  Although these vendors situated the images within a well-researched historical context, something I favor over letting the images float about with a context, selling this material seemed wrong;  it should be made freely available to anyone who asks.  After two years of dithering, I changed my mind.

I realized that it might be years before this material could be scanned in-house and be made available through our own digital repository.  Participating in one of these programs would get the material out there much sooner.  Second, and I learned this during discussions with Adam Matthew Digital with whom we eventually partnered, our institution received Master TIFFS of all of the images, along with any new metadata that AMD creates for the image.  Third, we receive royalties from sales, which can help us scan more of our own material.  Yay!!!    Fourth, participating in the project did not prevent us from sharing these materials with our researchers on an individual basis;  we are only restricted from including them in a competing large-scale digital project, and we could include scans of items from the collection that we already had that were pertinent to the project;  these items would be under no restrictions, but still would be shared with a potentially broader audience through the project. And fifth, I could help shape the context in which the images were were viewed.

A colleague in another unit in the U of MN Libraries also decided to participate in a different ADM project, so we developed the contracts, procedures, and protocols together, which will now serve as a model for any future projects we or our colleagues may pursue.

The Bell Library is partnering with Adam Matthew in the "Age of Exploration" package, scheduled to be released in 2018.  If you are interested in this or other Adam Matthew Digital projects, check out their web site:  http://www.amdigital.co.uk/