Inside the Storms: Severe Storm Studies from Observation to Analysis, 1650 to 2000

Material Description

The materials include 17th- through 20th-century books on meteorology and storms in several collections held by OU History of Science Collections; the portion of the Edwin Kessler III Collection related to the development of weather applications for radar and the establishment and early decades of the National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL); maps of storm events and related damage by Theodore Fujita's research group, held by the National Weather Center (NWC) Library; the NSSL slide archive of storm and radar images; NSSL field notes from severe weather research teams; and NSSL storm-spotter training slide sets held by the NWC Library.

Summary

In this three-year project, the University of Oklahoma, National Weather Center Library, and National Severe Storms Lab will collaborate to digitize a variety of rare books and archival materials related to the study of severe storms and will make them publicly and freely available through a digital repository. All three partners are providing content to be digitized, including rare books and archival materials ranging from maps, slides, and photographs to documents and field notes. The project comprises development of a metadata workflow; digitization and metadata creation; ingest into a publicly accessible digital repository with metadata exposed for harvesting; submission of metadata to subject-specific aggregators; and promotion of the project and repository to diverse scholarly communities. The project will make accessible online for the first time these significant, diverse assets in the history of atmospheric science and will create many new entry points for scholarly inquiry as well as future projects.