Harish Maringanti
Associate Dean for Research, IT & Digital Library Services
University of Utah
While academic librarians typically focus on readily available, electronic research outputs, a treasure trove of valuable data lies hidden in researchers’ filing cabinets. This legacy data, often stored in print and slides spanning decades of work, remains largely inaccessible to the wider research community. This presents a significant challenge, particularly in fields like biodiversity, where historical information is crucial for analyzing trends, adaptations, and long-term relationships. At the University of Utah, a collaboration between the Marriott Library, the School of Biological Sciences, and Ocean Alliance resulted in a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)-funded project that helped to bring a hidden collection into the digital age. The project resulted in digitizing a unique historical dataset: the Patagonian Right Whale Program data. Since 1971, researchers have conducted annual aerial surveys of the whale population, capturing over 70,000 slides. This project brought the entire collection—slides, negatives, aerial maps, and field notes—into the digital age. Not only were they digitized, but metadata was extracted and mapped from an old Microsoft Access database. The session will share project challenges and opportunities and explain how will it benefit researchers worldwide.