Aims and objectives
Boyden Observatory is located near Bloemfontein, some 1,000 km from Cape Town, where the Centre for Astronomical Heritage NPC (CfAH) and the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) are located. This project was established to physically and digitally preserve the oldest, and most at-risk, unique material associated with Boyden Observatory (primarily paper documents and astronomical/other photographs on glass); to publicize the collection and make it available to researchers; to build a firm foundation for continued work on the remainder of the material; to motivate keepers of other parts of the historically fragmented Boyden Observatory archives to digitize their collections; and to present a workshop on document preservation, digitization, and digital preservation, to a broader community.
Outcomes
The project achieved the following outcomes:
- A much-needed logical arrangement was devised to bring the collection under control
- Material was cleaned and rehoused in custom-made enclosures
- Inventory was updated and expanded, new material (including unique weather logs) was located and included
The digitised material includes original observing notes and records [22,578 digital copies; 1891-1933], glass plates of astronomical objects and terrestrial subjects (including people) [392; 1900s], astronomical register books [969; 1919-1967], and weather records of value to climatologists [985; 1947-1979].
The physical objects (mostly of paper and glass) have been placed in archivally-stable custom enclosures stored in the Boyden Observatory Museum.
Digital versions will be deposited with the University of the Free State (UFS) and the Centre for Astronomical Heritage (CfAH) and will be publicly available. This project was carried out under the auspices of CfAH, which will make the collection available via their website. The individual files will be stored on CERN’s Zenodo platform. They will be discoverable via the CfAH’s web portal, which will make the catalogue searchable, and also allow expert collaborators to add/correct descriptive metadata.
The records copied by this project have been catalogued as:
- EAP1190/1 Endangered Records in the Boyden Observatory Archive (1891-1994)
Due to the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023, the archives and manuscripts database is currently inaccessible and we are unable to provide links to the catalogue records for this project.
