What is it like to photograph, organize, and display an orthographer’s bird watching journals, representing a lifetime of field observations that began more than a century ago? How does it feel to touch the exquisite beauty and feel the ancient history emanating from hundreds of rare images of birds housed in Princeton University’s vast collections?
Jennifer Cabral-Pierce, Digital Imaging Technician at Princeton University Library, SC&I Master of Information student, professional photographer, and artist, knows first-hand.
As part of the university library’s Digital Imaging Studio staff, Cabral-Pierce was fortunate to be a part of the team assigned to work on the “The Charles Rogers Bird Journals Digitization Project,” a multidisciplinary collaboration between Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and the Princeton University Library (PUL).
Following the completion of the Rogers project, Cabral-Pierce proposed creating an online exhibition showcasing the images the library staff had focused on during the Rogers project. The result is “Capturing Feathers: An Imaging Journal of Digitized Collections.” The exhibition, at Princeton University Library (PUL), includes images of birds taken from about 26 items in the university’s collection. Princeton University Library’s digital repository houses over 130,000 digitized items from the Library’s unique and rare collections.
Through her efforts, and those of the colleagues she worked with across Princeton University, the general public can now experience the exceptional artistry, beauty, and history of dozens of images of birds from across time and space and learn about the fascinating stories behind the images.
“I am very grateful that PUL trusted my idea to create an exhibition of the images of birds that are spread out through the university’s collections,” Cabral-Pierce said.
“Capturing Feathers” is divided into several exhibition pages. The first page is named “Exhibition - An Imaging Journal of Digitized Collections: Capturing Feathers.”
The exhibition page named “The Charles Rogers Bird Journals Digitization Project: The Bird Room,” explains how the idea of digitizing the personal bird-watching journals of Charles Rogers developed at the university, and the people involved. This section includes, according to the website, “over 10,000 pages of the personal journals of ornithologist Charles H. Rogers (1888-1977)” that were digitized and transcribed to generate invaluable data for climate change, conservation, and biodiversity studies.”
The exhibition page “Capturing Bird Imagery Across Collections: Bird Watchers” tells the story of the work Cabral-Pierce and her team at the university libraries’ Digital Imaging Studio completed during the course of the Rogers project.
Other pages in the exhibition include “Coloring our Collections: Coloring Feathers” which is a coloring book; a selection of e-books for bird enthusiasts called “A Bird List”; and “Activities for birders: Birders Count” which provides details about places in New Jersey and beyond to watch birds.
“Prior to digitization, only when holding the actual item would someone fully experience such valuable library materials, but digitization is as close as you can get to touching and feeling these pages from anywhere you are in the world. In the Digital Imaging Studio, I have the unique opportunity to assist making such content accessible,” Cabral-Pierce said.
The exhibition’s origins began when the Charles Rogers Bird Journals Digitization Project was proposed. The Rogers project, according to the website, “. . . started in January 2019 when Mary “Cassie” Stoddard, an assistant professor in EEB, contacted the library about an extraordinary set of bird journals in the Princeton Bird Collection. The Princeton Bird Collection, curated by longtime EEB staff member Betty Horn, is home to more than 6,000 bird specimens. The specimens are used for teaching and research; several ongoing projects in the Stoddard Lab, which investigates avian coloration and morphology, make use of collection material.
Cabral-Pierce said working on the exhibition and with the collections was thrilling, and she could not have accomplished her work on this exhibition without the knowledge she has gained at Rutgers as an MI student.
“To preserve Rogers’ handwritten journals, some now over a century old, and to make their contents available to researchers, Stoddard and several lab members—including Ph.D. student Audrey Miller and undergraduate Annika Kruse ’20—worked with Betty Horn and a team at the Princeton University Library that grew to include staff from Library Information Technology, the Digital Imaging Studio, and the Preservation and Conservation group.”
After Rogers’ journals were digitized and the project was over, Cabral-Pierce proposed creating “Capturing Feathers.” She and her team wrote about the origins of the exhibition on the website: “Inspired by, and to mark the completion of the recently digitized personal journals of ornithologist Charles H. Rogers, the Digital Imaging Studio at Princeton University Library created this online exhibition, focusing on bird imagery found throughout the Princeton University Library Digital Repository. Just like the entries in bird journals detailing the timing of each sighting of a species, this selection from Princeton University Library holdings is presented on a timeline, from its creation, acquisition, cataloging, and addition to the digital repository, compiling a concise imaging journal of each digitized collection item.”
Cabral-Pierce said she is extremely grateful to her co-workers who made it possible for her to create the exhibition online. “Without the Princeton Library IT team who built the digital repositories and online exhibition features nothing would have been possible. That’s part of the beauty of the project – the IT team had already created all the features to generate an exhibition like this. All I did was use the tools that were already there. This feature wasn’t created by IT just for ‘Capturing Feathers,’ it’s a feature the library IT team – who are amazing – built that can be used for any collection at Princeton.”
The coronavirus pandemic had a big impact on the creation of the exhibition, Cabral-Pierce said. “At the beginning of the pandemic my department was working from home, and in addition to the photography we were also assigned to do some transcriptions of the Charles Rogers material, which is something we had never done before. This is typing all of the transcriptions, bird by bird. I and the other photographers contributed to the transcription work. If we had physically been at the library, we would have photographed the journals and never seen them again. But by doing the transcriptions too, I was involved with the material for so long I decided to propose an exhibition. If anyone doubted or did not understand the importance of digitization before the pandemic, COVID-19 proved how important it is. It’s essential.”
Cabral-Pierce said working on the exhibition and with the collections was thrilling, and she could not have accomplished her work on this exhibition without the knowledge she has gained at Rutgers as an MI student.
Her academic achievements were recognized recently at SC&I’s Honors Day celebration, held on May 5, 2021, when Cabral-Pierce was named the recipient of an Outstanding Academic Achievement award in the MI program.
“The faculty and advisors at SC&I have been so supportive in my career development,” Cabral-Pierce said. “The ability to attend a part-time online program has given me the flexibility I need to complete a master’s while working full-time. What I am learning in the MI program I can apply directly in my tasks as a Digital Imaging Technician, and it assists me to navigate the complexities of librarianship woven within a digital context.”
She credits specific faculty members with providing her with guidance and inspiration, and said, “Lilia Pavlovsky and Marija Dalbello have been invaluable in helping me navigate the demanding academic life. I keep their example of dedication and professionalism as a reference for myself academically and professionally. I am also grateful to the openness of faculty members such as Professor Michael Lesk, who is my professor this semester, for supporting my interests and letting me explore subjects relevant in the MI field while using photography - a theme I constantly gravitate towards.”
The MI classes she has taken directly applied to her work on the exhibition, Cabral-Pierce said.
“So much of what I am learning in class really assisted me to do this project, so the MI program is enriching my professional life so much. I have more current, updated information because I am a student."
“So much of what I am learning in class really assisted me to do this project, so the MI program is enriching my professional life so much. I have more current, updated information because I am a student. Through my classes I have studied the concept of curation and developed the ability to choose materials and create a dialogue with a collection. I took the class “Museum Information and Technology,” it was an elective class that covered social informatics, and preservation issues. After that class, I decided to specialize in preservation because it’s so connected to my work at Princeton, and my work as a professional photographer and artist.”
Cabral-Pierce said she is still in the middle of the MI program, and she hopes to graduate in 2022. “It’s taking me a very long to finish, I’m moving very slowly, taking one class a semester.”
Asked how she manages her time, Cabral-Pierce said, “I use the weekends to do most of my work. I am married but I don’t have children, so this works for me. I try to read all the materials in the evenings throughout the week, whenever I can fit homework in. I keep my work on my bedside table! I highlight the text, I take notes about important things I think I can use for my assignments, and then on the weekends I sit with whatever I read throughout the week and I write the papers.”
The research papers, she said, “help me to see the work my peers in the library and information field are doing – how archives are being created, how photographers are managing their data, and how the preservation is being done for various collections. I also love focusing on historical papers. I have written some papers on specific photographers and techniques from the past. I wrote about cyanotypes, and about Mexican photographer, Graciela Iturbide. And I am not reading all of the assignments just to write the papers. I apply what I am learning to my personal artwork, my professional work – I use all the information I learn somehow. So my photography, my art, and my work at Princeton all benefit from the MI program.”
Cabral-Pierce also said she always strives to make what she is studying relevant. For example, she said her current class is “Data Curation,” and she might do her final paper about her personal collection as a photographer because figuring out how to manage digital preservation is something she is struggling with.
"That’s why the MI program is so essential for me – it gives me the knowledge and the vocabulary to more effectively apply the skills I already had to a completely different field."
Asked what advice she would give to a prospective master’s student, she said, “My advice is, pick a program you like because then you don’t mind all the work! I have the luck to have professors who let me choose to work on what I love. The personal story I tell about the MI program is, how does a photographer become a librarian? I was a photographer, and through the MI program I’ve been trained to use my skills in photography within a library setting. That’s why the MI program is so essential for me – it gives me the knowledge and the vocabulary to more effectively apply the skills I already had to a completely different field. Always use what you know because everything you know is always somehow applicable to everything you are doing. Don’t be afraid to make connections that are not obvious.”
Discover more about the Master of Information program in the Library and Information Science Department at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.
A note about the article banner image: This representation is a cropped detail and not the actual image on the scroll. Reference: Garrett Ethiopic Magic Scroll No. 44; Robert Garrett Collection of Ethiopic Magic Scrolls, (C0744.04), Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Click to see the entire parchment scroll including three additional detailed talismanic drawings.
After viewing so many beautiful images of birds during the past year, Cabral-Pierce said some of her favorites from the exhibition are those listed below. They are available to see on the “Capturing Birds” “Birds Watcher’s” page here.
Garrett Ethiopic Magic Scroll No. 44; Robert Garrett Collection of Ethiopic Magic Scrolls, (C0744.04), Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Click to see the entire parchment scroll including three additional detailed talismanic drawings.
Arizona, Hopi, Pueblos: photograph album, (C0938 no. 21bq), page I. 64 r. recto, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Click to explore all pages of this photo album, which contains 118 platinum print (plainotype) ethonographic photographs of Hopi Indians, Hopi pueblos, and the native lifestyle in Arizona.
Physica sacra, vol. 1, (EX Oversize 5366.816q), p. 642, Princeton University Library Collection Treasures of Rare Book Division, Rare Book Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Click to see numerous engravings of natural history throughout a total of four volumes richly illustrated.
Photos: Courtesy of Jennifer Cabral-Pierce
