Historical data recovery for multidisciplinary research on Alaska and the Arctic, 1841-1912

• Main Author: Wood, Kevin
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Axiom Data Science 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Bedford; Nantucket; New Bedford; Pacific; Sea ice; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24431/rw1k44s; https://search.dataone.org/#view/10.24431/rw1k44s

This data is focused on the large-scale recovery of Arctic and North Pacific historical environmental data---amounting to millions of individual observations—and making them available for new research, such as extended retrospective analysis (reanalysis) to study a range of lower-frequency climate phenomena and better understand their impact on the Arctic environment. This Excel spreadsheet is a manifest of approximately 22,000 high resolution digital images of selected vessel logbooks that were digitized for the project by Digital Commonwealth and at an imaging station at the New Bedford Whaling Museum (NBWM). The original manuscripts included here are held NBWM, at the Nantucket Historical Association, and at Mystic Seaport Museum. The temporal range of the collection spans 1841 to 1912. Geographic coverage is global, with an emphasis on the North Pacific and Arctic. The information contained in the digitized vessel logbooks includes descriptions of historical weather, sea ice, and other environmental observations of the Arctic, as well as myriad details of life on board whaling vessels in the 19th century. This collection is an extension of the digitizing effort targeting Arctic whaling vessels that began under NPRB 1421, Historical sea ice reconnaissance and interactive mapping project. The dataset archived here is composed of manifest files that describe the digital assets that have been recovered by this project (Digitized_federal_ship_logbook_manifest_201507-201606_NPRB1532.csv and Digitized_whaling_ship_logbook_manifest_201507-201606_NPRB1532.csv). Note that some of the assets described in these data files do not yet have URLs associated with them; the data files will be updated as URLs are available. This dataset was generated under NPRB project 1532.